Learning utility models for decentralised coordinated target tracking

In decentralised target tracking, a set of sensors observes moving targets. When the sensors are static but steerable, each sensor must dynamically choose which target to observe in a decentralised manner. We show that the information exchanged by the sensors to synchronise their beliefs can be exploited to learn a model of the utility function that drives each others´ decisions. Instead of communicating utilities to enable negotiation, each sensor regresses on the learnt model to predict the utilities of other team members. This approach bridges the gap between coordinating implicitly, a locally-greedy solution, and negotiating explicitly. We validated our approach in both hardware and simulations, and found that it out-performed implicit coordination by a statistically significant margin with both ideal and limited communications.