On optimal asynchronous track fusion

In practice, multisensor systems use dissimilar sensors having different data rates. Such sensors may also have inherent delays as well as communication delays. In the existing approaches to track fusion, the common assumption used is that the sensors are synchronous and have no communication delays. This paper presents a fusion architecture that combines tracks provided by different sensors that have different sampling rate and communication delays. By providing two way communications between the sensor platforms and the track fusion center, it is shown that the proposed asynchronous track fusion architecture provides a solution that is optimal in the mean square sense. Simulations are presented to compare the performance of the proposed track fusion with its sequential processing counterpart.