Active target detection with mobile agents

A strategy for active target detection suitable for the use of mobile agents in a field is presented. In particular, there is an interest in autonomous underwater vehicles. By exploiting notions from group testing, the proposed algorithm decides when to collect new samples depending on whether the mobile agent perceives the sensor measurements correspond to noise or a target pattern. Under suitable assumptions about the field emanated by the target, i.e. the target signature is locally low rank in the field, one can efficiently sample the field to locate the target using O(m log m log n) samples on an n × n grid where m ≪ n is a parameter specifying the group size.