Title: Resilient Active Information Gathering with Mobile Robots,
Abstract: Applications of safety, security, and rescue in robotics, such as multi-robot
target tracking, involve the execution of information acquisition tasks by
teams of mobile robots. However, in failure-prone or adversarial environments,
robots get attacked, their communication channels get jammed, and their sensors
may fail, resulting in the withdrawal of robots from the collective task, and
consequently the inability of the remaining active robots to coordinate with
each other. As a result, traditional design paradigms become insufficient and,
in contrast, resilient designs against system-wide failures and attacks become
important. In general, resilient design problems are hard, and even though they
often involve objective functions that are monotone or submodular, scalable
approximation algorithms for their solution have been hitherto unknown. In this
paper, we provide the first algorithm, enabling the following capabilities:
minimal communication, i.e., the algorithm is executed by the robots based only
on minimal communication between them; system-wide resiliency, i.e., the
algorithm is valid for any number of denial-of-service attacks and failures;
and provable approximation performance, i.e., the algorithm ensures for all
monotone (and not necessarily submodular) objective functions a solution that
is finitely close to the optimal. We quantify our algorithm's approximation
performance using a notion of curvature for monotone set functions. We support
our theoretical analyses with simulated and real-world experiments, by
considering an active information gathering scenario, namely, multi-robot
target tracking.