Information-theoretic coordinated control of multiple sensor platforms

Abstract

This paper describes an information-theoretic approach to distributed and coordinated control of a multi-robot sensor system. The approach is based on techniques long established for the related problem of decentralised data fusion (DDF). The DDF architecture uses information measures to communicate state estimates in a network of sensors. For coordinated control of robot sensors, the control objective becomes maximisation of these information measures. This yields platform trajectories, which maximise the total information, gained by the system. This approach inherits the many benefits of the DDF method including scalability, robustness to sub-system failure and addition, and interoperability among heterogeneous systems. The approach is applied to a practical bearings-only multi-feature localisation problem.