optimal foraging of renewable resources

Consider a team of agents in the plane searching for and visiting target points that appear in a bounded environment according to a stochastic renewal process with a known absolutely continuous spatial distribution. Agents must detect targets with limited-range onboard sensors. It is desired to minimize the expected waiting time between the appearance of a target point, and the instant it is visited. When the sensing radius is small, the system time is dominated by time spent searching, and it is shown that the optimal policy requires the agents to search a region at a relative frequency proportional to the square root of its renewal rate.

The Root Density Sweep policy

related publications

1. J.J. Enright, K. Savla, and E. Frazzoli, Efficient Cooperative Search and Surveillance, chapter in Handbook of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, edited by Kimon P. Valavanis and George J. Vachtsevanos, published by Springer, invited and in preparation, 2012.


2. J.J. Enright and E.Frazzoli, Optimal Foraging of Renewable Resources, in the American Control Conference, 2012. [PDF]


3. John J. and E. Frazzoli, Optimal Foraging of Renewable Resources, IEEE Trans. on Robotics submitted September 2011, under revision. [arXiv PDF]


4. V. A. Huynh, J. J. Enright, and E. Frazzoli, Persistent Patrol with Limited-range On-board sensors, IEEE Conf. on Decision and Control, Atlanta, GA, 2010. [PDF]


5. V. A. Huynh, J. J. Enright, and E. Frazzoli, Persistent Patrol in Stochastic Environments with Limited Sensors, AIAA Conf. on Guidance, Navigation, and Control, Toronto, Canada, 2010. [PDF]


6. John J. Enright, Efficient Routing of Multi-Vehicle Systems: limited sensing and nonholonomic motion constraints, PhD Thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department, June 2008. [PDF]


7. Alessandro Arsie, John J. Enright, and Emilio Frazzoli, On the Value of Information in Dynamic Multiple-Vehicle Routing Problems, In J. Shamma, editor, Cooperative Control of Distributed Multi-Agent Systems, John Wiley & Sons, 2007. AMAZON


8. J.J. Enright and E. Frazzoli, Cooperative UAV Routing with Limited Sensor Range, In AIAA Conf. on Guidance, Navigation, and Control, Keystone, CO, August 2006. Note: Paper AIAA-2006-6208. [PDF]