Multi-robot target detection and tracking: taxonomy and survey

Target detection and tracking encompasses a variety of decisional problems such as coverage, surveillance, search, patrolling, observing and pursuit-evasion along with others. These problems are studied by several communities, that tackle them using diverse formulations, hypotheses and approaches. This variety and the fact that target related robotics problems are pertinent for a large spectrum of applications has motivated a large amount of contributions, which have mostly been surveyed according to one or another viewpoint. In this article, our objective is to go beyond the frontiers of specific communities and specific problems, and to enlarge the scope of prior surveys. We define classes of missions and problems, and relate the results from various communities according to a unifying taxonomy. We review various work related to each class of problems identified in the taxonomy, highlighting the different approaches, models and results. Finally, we propose a transverse synthesis which analyses the approaches, models and lacks that are recurrent through all the tackled problems, and isolate the current main research directions.