Cooperative relay tracking strategy for multi-agent systems with assistance of Voronoi diagrams

We study a class of multi-agent tracking system, in which targets are caught by cooperative agents in a monitoring area. A certain domain is monitored by a large number of agents, who are capable of sensing and mobility. In reality, agents are not able to measure absolute position of a target but able to measure the distances. However, when designing the tracking controller, the absolute position information is required. Therefore, we adopt trilateration algorithm to get the absolute position of a target through at least three distances. This monitored domain is overlapped by at least three monitoring agents and some redundant agents and with the assistance of knowledge of Voronoi diagrams it is divided into many Voronoi cells. Then, a cooperative relay tracking strategy is proposed such that during the tracking process, when a target enters a new Voronoi cell, the Voronoi site agent replaces one of the original tracking agents. This means that not only the topology but also the tracking agents switch, which is significantly different from the traditional switching topologies. With the introduction of redundant agents, this domain can deal with the situation that several targets share the same route. Finally, the proposed tracking strategy is verified by a set of simulations.