A coordination mechanism for model-based multi-sensor planning

This paper presents a multi-agent system for coordinating the deployment of multiple sensors in a modeled environment. The sensing task is the maximal sensor coverage of one or more targets in a scene and the position of each sensor is controlled by an autonomous agent. The agents rely on negotiation to achieve the level of coordination necessary to accomplish the given sensing task. Currently, the system focuses on the use of cameras for visual inspection tasks in which a single camera may be inadequate due to occluding objects in the scene, the number of targets to be observed or the sheer size of the target. The paper presents the negotiation mechanism developed for the multi-agent planning of the camera positions and illustrates its effectiveness by an example. Results show that the agents were able to autonomously position the cameras so as to allow for an acceptable level of coverage of the targets being observed.