Detection of Dynamic Object by Multi-Agent Multicopter System Based on Thermal Motion Equivalent Method

This paper investigates the problem of searching for a moving object in a bounded area using a multi-agent system of quadrocopter-type aircraft. The Thermal Motion Equivalent Method (TMEM) method is proposed as a control algorithm. The main idea of TMEM is to simulate the behavior of gas particles, where parameters known from thermodynamics, such as RMS velocity and frequency of interactions, are used to evaluate the system stability and swarm task performance. An analogy between aircraft motion and molecular dynamics is achieved by the control system of each agent, which allows them to exchange information. This paper shows the effectiveness of the TMEM method for searching for a moving target in a limited space on the basis of numerous simulations performed in a specially developed MASPlatform environment, which is a virtual polygon. The simulation considers the motion of ten agents in a 10 km<sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> space, where the dynamics of each agent is described by a system of nonlinear differential equations using a quaternionic controller. The simulation results confirm the effectiveness of TMEM for solving the search problem. The paper also provides estimates of swarm size depending on the size of the search area. An approach for calculating the search time of a TMEM-based system for a moving object with known dynamics in a limited space is proposed. The calculations are based on the thermodynamic parameter “mean free path length”, which is important for real systems with limited energy resources of agents.