Locating moving entities in indoor environments with teams of mobile robots

Abstract

This article presents an implemented multi-robot system for playing the popular game of laser tag. The object of the game is to search for and tag opponents that can move freely about the environment. The main contribution of this paper is a new particle filter algorithm for tracking the location of many opponents in the presence of pervasive occlusion. We achieve efficient tracking principally through a clever factorization of our posterior into roles that can be dynamically added and merged. When searching for opponents, the individual agents greedily maximize their information gain, using a negotiation technique for coordinating their search efforts. Experimental results are provided, obtained with a physical robot system in large-scale indoor environments and through simulation.