The Cooperative Hunters Efficient Cooperative Search for Smart Targets Using UAV Swarms.pdfVIP

The Cooperative Hunters — Efficient Cooperative Search For Smart Targets Using UAV Swarms Yaniv Altshuler , Vladimir Yanovsky , Israel A. Wagner , and Alfred M. Bruckstein Computer Science Department, Technion, Haifa 32000 Israel yanival, volodyan, wagner, freddy@cs.technion.ac.il IBM Haifa Labs, MATAM, Haifa 31905 Israel wagner@ Abstract. This work examines the Cooperative Hunters problem, where a swarm of UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) is used for searching after one or more “smart targets” which are moving in a predefined area, while trying to avoid de- tection by the swarm. By arranging themselves into an efficient flight configura- tion, the UAVs optimizes their integrated sensing capability, and are thus capable of searching much larger territories than a group of uncooperative UAVs. The problem was introduced in [1], while similar work also appears in [6–10]. This work presents two decentralized cooperative search algorithms which demon- strate major improvements over the algorithm and analysis presented in [1]. The first algorithm uses improved flying patterns which achieve superior search per- formance. An analytic optimality proof for the algorithm’s performance is pre- sented. The second algorithm is a fault tolerant algorithm which allows the UAVs to search in areas whose shapes and sizes are unknown to the UAVs in advance (in comparison to the algorithm of [1] which is designed for rectangular shapes whose dimensions are known to the swarm). Keywords — Swarm Algorithm, Cooperative Search, UAVs Swarm. 1 Introduction Significant research effort has bee