Cooperative multitarget tracking and surveillance with mobile sensing agents: A decentralized approach

In this paper, we consider the problem of co-operative multitarget tracking and surveillance with multiple mobile sensing agents (MSAs) in a decentralized network architecture. In multitarget tracking, each MSA runs a particle filter for each target. A map of the environment and observations communicated between the agents are utilized in target tracking. In multitarget surveillance, a leader is selected for each subnetwork of agents. The leader assigns regions to the agents in the subnetwork. Then, the individual agents plan their motions to improve the tracking results of the targets inside of their assigned regions. Our approach is evaluated with a number of simulation runs. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our decentralized approach, and how its performance is affected by design parameters and communication range. We believe that our approach provides an effective cooperation strategy in multi-MSA multitarget tracking and surveillance applications.