A Communication-aware Information Measure for Cooperative Information Gathering by Robotic Sensor Networks

Computing communication-aware information for cooperative information gathering of multi-agent systems is important but still remains a challenge. In this paper, a mathematical formulation is presented for a communication-aware information measure for problems with non-linear dynamics and non-Gaussian distributions. This paper also presents a particle method for computation of the information measure in order to approximate target state and measurement PDFs given communication-aware measurements. The presented approach is assessed through simulations by comparing with the perfect communication scenario. The simulation results show how communication-aware information is different from the information under perfect communication and how imperfect communication affects the information measure.