Environmental estimation with distributed finite element agents
Matthew L. Elwin, Randy A. Freeman, Kevin Lynch · 2016
We develop an environmental estimation method that allows large groups of agents to infer the value of an environmental field using measurements. Agents maintain estimates for subregions of the domain and communicate with local neighbors, so the method's communication and memory requirements do not increase with the number of agents, the size of the environment representation, or the agents' density in the environment. Despite the distributed representation, the union of individual estimates matches an estimate generated by a central computer with access to all measurements employing the variational inverse method, a finite element-based interpolation procedure. We also introduce a distributed query system, allowing users to determine an estimate anywhere in the domain without accessing all measurements or the full environment representation.