An Active–Passive Networked Multiagent Systems Approach to Environment Surveillance

This paper presents a novel application of multiagent systems to environment surveillance and develops a robust network wherein there is no need for a gateway node, which fuses information received from each node to construct a global map on a single location, and may cause a communication bottleneck. Recognizing the fact that network nodes may be heterogeneous with respect to the number of exogenous inputs such that a node may not sense a quantity or can sense multiple quantities for certain time instants, we utilize a recently developed active-passive networked multiagent systems approach. Specifically, this approach consists of agents subject to exogenous inputs (active agents) and agents without any inputs (passive agents). The key feature of this approach is that the states of all nodes converge to the average of the exogenous inputs, where these inputs may or may not overlap within the active agents. A detailed illustrative study is provided to demonstrate the efficacy of this approach as applied to environment surveillance.