Spill Detection and Perimeter Surveillance via Distributed Swarming Agents

The problem of perimeter detection and monitoring has a variety of applications. In this paper, a hybrid system of finite states is proposed for multiple autonomous robotic agents with the purpose of hazardous spill perimeter detection and tracking. In the system, each robotic agent is assumed to be in one of three states: searching, pursuing, and tracking. The agents are prioritized based on their states, and a potential field is constructed for agents in each state. For an agent in the tracking state, the agent's location and velocity as well as those of its closest leading and trailing agents are utilized to control its movement. The convergence of the tracking algorithm is analyzed for multiple spills under certain conditions. Simulation and experiment results show that with the proposed method, the agents can successfully detect and track the spills of various shapes, sizes, and movements.

I. Introduction

The development of swarm robotics has emerged as a tool for mobile sensor networks in a variety of areas, such as environment monitoring [1], foraging [2], [3], target detection [4], and target tracking [5]. Two different kinds of control (centralized and decentralized) can be implemented for the robot group. In centralized control, all agents in the group are assumed to be able to share their information [6]. This kind of control suffers from computational burden if the number of agents is relatively large. More often, decentralized control is used for swarm robotics with information shared only among agents within a local network [1], [7]–[11]. In this paper, we propose a method for the problem of perimeter detection and tracking via swarm robots, which has a variety of applications such as forest fire surveillance [12], oil leakage tracking [13], and animal herd monitoring.