ODISSEE is a research project supported by the French Government Defense procurement agency (Direction Générale de l’Armement) and the French National Research Agency (Agence Nationale pour la Recherche) in the frame of the Research program ASTRID.

Consider a distributed system formed by autonomous mobile agents seeking to simultaneously discover their physical environment and planify their motions in a coordinate fashion. Scenarios of interest include autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and drones.

Unlike the standard scenario which assumes that some fusion center is able to collect the sensors’ observations and to govern the global network’s behavior, we assume on the opposite that the processing and the decisions are achieved at the agent level. To accomplish the global network’s mission, individual nodes are able to exchange limited information with their neighbors through unperfect wireless links and in an asynchronous fashion.

The ODISSEE problems addresses two crucial problems regarding defence applications: i) Distributed estimation and communication protocols in wireless sensor networks, ii) Planification, optimization and coordination in distributed mobile systems. The rationale behind ODISSEE relies on the claim that the above objectives share a common formulation in terms of a distributed optimization problem. The aim of ODISSEE is to bridge the gap between theoretical optimization methods and practical defence applications related to statistical estimation and motion coordination.