Abstract
An Informed Path Planning algorithm for multiple agents is presented. It can be used to efficiently utilize available agents when surveying large areas, when total coverage is unattainable. Internally the algorithm has a Probability Hypothesis Density (PHD) representation, inspired by modern multi-target tracking methods, to represent unseen objects. Using the PHD, the expected number of observed objects is optimized. In a sequential manner, each agent maximizes the number of observed new targets, taking into account the probability of undetected objects due to previous agents’ actions and the probability of detection, which yields a scalable algorithm. Algorithm properties are evaluated in simulations, and shown to outperform a greedy base line method. The algorithm is also evaluated by applying it to a sea ice tracking problem, using two datasets collected in the Arctic, with reasonable results. An implementation is provided under an Open Source license.
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Notes
The LMB tracker used is available as Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) at https://github.com/jonatanolofsson/clmb. The planner described in this chapter is available at https://github.com/jonatanolofsson/phdplanner.
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This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 642153, as well as the Research Council of Norway through the Centres of Excellence funding scheme, Grant Number 223254 – NTNU-AMOS. G. Hendeby has been funded by the Center for Industrial Information Technology at Linköping University (CENIIT). The tri campaign was funded by the Fram Centre project Ground-based radar measurements of sea-ice, icebergs, and growlers
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Olofsson, J., Hendeby, G., Lauknes, T.R. et al. Multi-agent informed path planning using the probability hypothesis density. Auton Robot 44, 913–925 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-020-09904-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-020-09904-1