Evidence Based Navigation in Swarms

A low-complexity, evidence based navigation algorithm for swarms of mobile sensors is presented. It can be effectively used in scenarios where a particular event signature is characterized by a mix of weak signal modalities with certain degrees of intensity, distributed in a local region. The method is based on Dempster-Shafer (DS) evidence theory and enables the mobile nodes to process temporally ordered sensor data and accommodate imprecise information from multi-modal sensors on board. Local decisions are made based on fused evidence triggering an attractive beacon, which in turn draws other agents for further detection and tracking. Simulation results are presented for a multi-modal signal signature tracking scenario