Cooperative source seeking via networked multi-vehicle systems

This paper studies the cooperative source seeking problem via a networked multi-vehicle system. In contrast to existing literature, the multi-vehicle system is controlled to the source position that maximizes aggregated multiple unknown scalar fields and each sensor-enabled vehicle only samples measurements of one scalar field. Thus, a single vehicle is unable to localize the source and has to cooperate with its neighboring vehicles. By jointly exploiting the ideas of the consensus algorithm and the stochastic extremum seeking (ES), this paper proposes novel distributed stochastic ES controllers, which are gradient-free and do not need any absolute information, such that the multi-vehicle system simultaneously approaches the source position. The effectiveness of the proposed controllers is proved for quadratic scalar fields. Finally, illustrative examples are included to validate the theoretical results.