Information Acquisition in Data Fusion Systems

By purposefully utilising sensors, for instance by a datafusion system, the state of some system-relevant environmentmight be adequately assessed to support decision-making. Theever increasing access to sensors o.ers great opportunities,but alsoincurs grave challenges. As a result of managingmultiple sensors one can, e.g., expect to achieve a morecomprehensive, resolved, certain and more frequently updatedassessment of the environment than would be possible otherwise.Challenges include data association, treatment of con.ictinginformation and strategies for sensor coordination.We use the term information acquisition to denote the skillof a data fusion system to actively acquire information. Theaim of this thesis is to instructively situate that skill in ageneral context, explore and classify related research, andhighlight key issues and possible future work. It is our hopethat this thesis will facilitate communication, understandingand future e.orts for information acquisition.The previously mentioned trend towards utilisation of largesets of sensors makes us especially interested in large-scaleinformation acquisition, i.e., acquisition using many andpossibly spatially distributed and heterogeneous sensors.Information acquisition is a general concept that emerges inmany di.erent .elds of research. In this thesis, we surveyliterature from, e.g., agent theory, robotics and sensormanagement. We, furthermore, suggest a taxonomy of theliterature that highlights relevant aspects of informationacquisition.We describe a function, perception management (akin tosensor management), which realizes information acquisition inthe data fusion process and pertinent properties of itsexternal stimuli, sensing resources, and systemenvironment.An example of perception management is also presented. Thetask is that of managing a set of mobile sensors that jointlytrack some mobile targets. The game theoretic algorithmsuggested for distributing the targets among the sensors proveto be more robust to sensor failure than a measurement accuracyoptimal reference algorithm.Keywords:information acquisition, sensor management,resource management, information fusion, data fusion,perception management, game theory, target tracking

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