Abstract
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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.