Team optimization of cooperating systems: application to maximal area coverage

The composite effort of the system team, rather, is significantly more important than a single player's individual performance. We consider the case wherein each player's performance is tuned to result in maximal team performance for the specific case of maximal area coverage (MAC). The approach is first illustrated through solution of MAC by a fixed number of deformable shapes. An application to sonar is then presented. Here, sonar control parameters determine a range-depth area of coverage. The coverage is also affected by known but uncontrollable environmental parameters. The problem is to determine K sets of sonar ping parameters that result in MAC. The forward problem of determining coverage given control and environmental parameters is computationally intensive. To facilitate real time cooperative optimization among a number of such systems, the sonar input-output is captured in a feedforward layered perceptron neural network.