Decentralized Decision Making and Information Sharing in a Team of Autonomous Mobile Agents

<p>In an attempt to realize decentralized cooperation and coordination in a heterogeneousteam of autonomous mobile agents, we have proposed a platform to model many practicalissues encountered in the process. The system includes an unexplored environment and ateam of agents with different capabilities. The agents' movement follows trajectories limitedby speed and turning radius, and their actions may be affected by their orientation relativeto targets. The stochasticity introduced by task transition makes o-line task assignmentinapplicable.</p><p>A basic distributed real-time assignment algorithm and an intelligent predictive decisionmaking strategy are proposed and compared. The results show that prediction can helpimprove the performance of cooperative agent teams engaged in search-and-engage missions.These algorithms are implemented with the assumption of perfect communication.</p><p>The assumption of perfect communication is relaxed in the second part of the work reported,resulting in a truly decentralized system that is simulated in a somewhat simplermission scenario. Each agent in this decentralized model has its own subjective informationbase (SIB) based on limited observations and information sharing, and uses a set of informationfusion heuristics to maintain this SIB. The performance of the system is evaluatedrelative to the degree of information sharing. The results indicate that cooperation basedon information exchange { even if it is imperfect { can produce excellent performance.</p><p>A hybrid communication strategy combining occasional limited-range communicationand opportunistic peer-to-peer synchronization is then proposed. Using Monte Carlo simulations,it is shown that this strategy can significantly supplement the efficacy of a diffusiveinformation sharing strategy.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

MS

Level thesis:degree_level

masters

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Engineering and Applied Science: Electrical Engineering

Grantor dc:publisher

University of Cincinnati

Year dc:date

2012

Author dc:creator

• Liao, Yan

Contributors dc:contributor

• Minai, Ali

• Electrical Engineering
• Cooperative search
• Distributed task assignment
• Multi-agent coordination
• Information sharing
• Information fusion
• Umnanned aerial vehicles

Statement dc:rights

• unrestricted
• This thesis or dissertation is protected by copyright: all rights reserved. It may not be copied or redistributed beyond the terms of applicable copyright laws.

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=ucin1353101024

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:etd.ohiolink.edu:ucin1353101024