Exploration and control of stochastic spatiotemporal systems with mobile agents

Control of a spatiotemporal field with mobile agents has received considerable recent

interest. A key problem in this area is the tendency of agents to become static once a local control

objective is met. To overcome this issue, we propose a novel approach inspired by classic control

theory, cautious control, that augments the control cost with field uncertainty. This provokes

the agents into exploring the field by being attracted to regions of high uncertainty, in addition

to satisfying the control objective. A top-down approach is employed to reduce the potentially

complex, abstract problem into an N-step ahead decision making problem, which is easy to

implement and shown to give improved results when compared to both static agents and agents

which do not take into account field uncertainty. The ensuing intuitive conclusion is that, when

faced with the problem of spatiotemporal control with mobile agents, it is largely advantageous

to include field uncertainty in the trajectory planning control objective.