Search for Smart Evaders with Swarms of Sweeping Agents- a Resource Allocation Perspective

Assume that inside a given planar circular region, there are smart mobile evaders, that we would like to detect using sweeping agents. We assume that the agents total sensing resources are a line sensor of predetermined length, which is divided between the swarm’s agents. We propose procedures for designing cooperative sweeping processes that guarantee the detection of all evaders that were inside the original evader region. The task is accomplished by deriving conditions on the sweeping velocity of the agents and their paths, thus ensuring that evaders with a given limit on their velocity are caught. A simpler task for the swarm is the confinement of evaders to their initial domain. The feasibility of completing these tasks depends on geometric and dynamic constraints that impose a lower bound on the pursuers’ velocities. This lower bound ensures the satisfaction of the confinement task. Increasing the velocity above the lower bound enables the sweeper swarm of agents to complete the search task as well. We present results on the total search time as a function of the velocity of the swarm’s agents given the initial conditions on the size of the search region and the evaders’ maximal velocity under limited sensing capabilities of the swarm. The established results provide insights on the practical tradeoffs in designing a multi-agent system, where the alternatives are to deploy a smaller number of sophisticated and expensive agents, or to deploy a larger number of simple, cost-effective agents.