Tracking Anonymous Targets using a Robotic Sensor Network

We address the problem of tracking multiple anonymous targets using a network of communicating robots and stationary sensors. Weintroduce a regionbased approach w ich controls robot deployment at wo levels. A coarse deployment controller distributes robots across regions u ing a topological m pand density estimates, anda target-following controller attempts omaximize the number of tracked targets within a region. A behavior-based system is presented implementing theregion-based approach. Intensive simulations were performed to investigate th correlation between our approach and the degree of occlusion in the environment. Theregion-based approach s ows better performance than a ’naive’ local-following strategy when the environment has significant occlusion. We performed real-robot experiments to validate the system. These experiments open up a new line of research, which suggests that an optimal ratio of robots to stationary sensors may exist for a given environment with certain occlusion characteristics.