Stable Cooperative Surveillance

We consider a cooperative surveillance problem for a group of autonomous air vehicles (AAVs) that periodically receives information on suspected locations of targets from a satellite and then must cooperate to decide which AAV should search for each target. This cooperation must be performed in spite of imperfect inter-vehicle communications, less than full communication connectivity between vehicles, uncertainty in target locations, and imperfect vehicle search sensors. We represent the state of the search progress with a "search map," and use an invariant set to model the set of states where there is no useful information on target locations. We show that the invariant set is exponentially stable for a class of cooperative surveillance strategies. Next, we show via simutations the impact of imperfect communications, imperfect vehicle search sensors, uncertainty in search locations, and pop-up suspected locations on performance.