Multi-level State Estimation in an Outdoor Decentralised Sensor Network

Decentralised estimation of heterogeneous sensors is performed on an outdoor network. Attributes such as position, appearance, and identity represented by non-Gaussian distributions are used in in the fusion process. It is shown here that real-time decentralised data fusion of non-Gaussian estimates can be used to build rich environmental maps. Human operators are also used as additional sensors in the network to complement robotic information.

[1]  Geoffrey E. Hinton,et al.  The EM algorithm for mixtures of factor analyzers , 1996 .

[2]  Hugh Durrant-Whyte,et al.  Data Fusion and Sensor Management: A Decentralized Information-Theoretic Approach , 1995 .

[3]  Sebastian Thrun,et al.  Decentralized Sensor Fusion with Distributed Particle Filters , 2002, UAI.

[4]  D. Alspach A gaussian sum approach to the multi-target identification-tracking problem , 1975, Autom..

[5]  Alan S. Willsky,et al.  Mobile agents in adaptive hierarchical Bayesian networks for global awareness , 1998, SMC'98 Conference Proceedings. 1998 IEEE International Conference on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics (Cat. No.98CH36218).

[6]  Alexei Makarenko,et al.  Implementation of an Indoor Active Sensor Network , 2004, ISER.

[7]  D. Corkill Blackboard Systems , 1991 .

[8]  A.S. Willsky,et al.  Nonparametric belief propagation for self-calibration in sensor networks , 2004, Third International Symposium on Information Processing in Sensor Networks, 2004. IPSN 2004.

[9]  Yaakov Bar-Shalom,et al.  Multitarget-multisensor tracking: Advanced applications , 1989 .

[10]  J. Tenenbaum,et al.  A global geometric framework for nonlinear dimensionality reduction. , 2000, Science.

[11]  Stefan B. Williams,et al.  A decentralized architecture for Active Sensor Networks , 2004, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2004. Proceedings. ICRA '04. 2004.

[12]  H. Durrant-Whyte,et al.  Rich probabilistic representations for bearing only decentralised data fusion , 2005, 2005 7th International Conference on Information Fusion.

[13]  Alexei Makarenko,et al.  Hierarchical Environment Model for Fusing Information from Human Operators and Robots , 2006, 2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[14]  Hugh Durrant-Whyte,et al.  Communication In General Decentralised Filters And The Coordinated Search Strategy , 2004 .

[15]  B. Upcroft,et al.  A Comparison of Probabilistic Representations for Decentralised Data Fusion , 2005, 2005 International Conference on Intelligent Sensors, Sensor Networks and Information Processing.

[16]  G. Pavlin,et al.  An agent-based approach to distributed data and information fusion , 2004 .

[17]  Ben Upcroft,et al.  Representing natural objects in unstructured environments , 2005, NIPS 2005.

[18]  D. Rubin,et al.  Maximum likelihood from incomplete data via the EM - algorithm plus discussions on the paper , 1977 .

[19]  Yakov Bar-Shalom,et al.  Multitarget-Multisensor Tracking: Principles and Techniques , 1995 .

[20]  Miles C. Walton,et al.  Collaborative Tools for Mixed Teams of Humans and Robots , 2003 .

[21]  J. Simonoff Multivariate Density Estimation , 1996 .

[22]  S. Sukkarieh,et al.  Decentralised data fusion with Parzen density estimates , 2004, Proceedings of the 2004 Intelligent Sensors, Sensor Networks and Information Processing Conference, 2004..

[23]  Jan Nunnink,et al.  A MAS approach to fusion of heterogeneous information , 2005, The 2005 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on Web Intelligence (WI'05).

[24]  H. Sorenson,et al.  Nonlinear Bayesian estimation using Gaussian sum approximations , 1972 .

[25]  Carlos Guestrin,et al.  Robust Probabilistic Inference in Distributed Systems , 2004, UAI.

[26]  Hugh F. Durrant-Whyte,et al.  Closed form solutions to the multiple-platform simultaneous localization and map building (SLAM) problem , 2000, SPIE Defense + Commercial Sensing.

[27]  Jeffrey K. Uhlmann,et al.  A non-divergent estimation algorithm in the presence of unknown correlations , 1997, Proceedings of the 1997 American Control Conference (Cat. No.97CH36041).

[28]  Lawrence D. Stone,et al.  Bayesian Multiple Target Tracking , 1999 .

[29]  Sumit Roy,et al.  Decentralized structures for parallel Kalman filtering , 1988 .

[30]  H. Sorenson,et al.  Recursive bayesian estimation using gaussian sums , 1971 .