A Game Theoretical Formulation of a Decentralized Cooperative Multi-Agent Surveillance Mission

摘要

This paper presents a multi-aerial-robot coordination game theoretical approach to perform a surveillance mission in a well-structured environment. Such a mission consists in constantly visiting a set of points of interest while minimizing the time interval between successive visits (idleness). The proposed approach optimizes the agents' action selection based on an N-player (cooperative) game framework. The main contributions are: (i) the formulation of an original player's utility function composed of parameters that are independent from the action choices of the others players; (ii) the demonstration that the game solution is the Nash equilibrium, and this equilibrium can be obtained by optimizing separately/individually the single player's action choice; (iii) the proposal of a decentralized algorithm used to conduct the mission, which works considering minimum communication among players. Simulations evaluate the different policies obtained, which are compared using as metric the average idleness of all points of interest. The proposed framework allows for the decrease of the idleness of watched points compared to random action selection, while keeping some kind of randomness of motion (measured by a predictability metric), which can likely be desired to curb the prediction of the team surveillance strategy by an intruder.