Cooperative Control of Vehicle Swarms for Acoustic Target Localization by Energy Flows

A control algorithm has been developed and experimentally validated for guiding swarms of robotic vehicles to acoustic targets. This novel algorithm uses pressure measurements from a set of sensors, each attached to a vehicle of the swarm, to deduce energy flows from the environment, and to move in the direction of maximum reflected intensity while controlling constraints between vehicles. The algorithm was validated using a collective of eight hand-placed microphones in an open-space area with a 50-m separation between an emitter and scatterer.