Coordinated CRLB-based Control for Tracking Multiple First Responders in 3D Environments

In this paper we study the problem of tracking a team of first responders with a fleet of autonomous mobile flying agents, operating in 3D environments. We assume that the first responders exhibit stochastic dynamics and evolve inside challenging environments with obstacles and occlusions. As a result, the mobile agents probabilistically receive noisy line-of-sight (LoS), as well as non-line-of-sight (NLoS) range measurements from the first responders. In this work, we propose a novel estimation (i.e., estimating the position of multiple first responders over time) and control (i.e., controlling the movement of the agents) framework based on the Cramér-Rao lower bound (CRLB). More specifically, we analytically derive the CRLB of the measurement likelihood function which we use as a control criterion to select the optimal joint control actions over all agents, thus achieving optimized tracking performance. The effectiveness of the proposed multi-agent multi-target estimation and control framework is demonstrated through an extensive simulation analysis.