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Information-theoretic management of mobile sensor agents

Tang, Zhijun

Abstract Details

2005, Doctor of Philosophy, Ohio State University, Electrical Engineering.

Sensor management (SM) is one of the key factors that determine the performance of a multi-sensor system, especially when the system consists of mobile sensor agents (MSA). Due to the strong interconnection between information processing and MSA motion control, a new set of theoretical foundations, design principles and performance metrics are needed. This dissertation presents a few attempts toward this goal by jointly studying the target-track-maintenance problem and the MSA motion-planning problem through the MSA-target scenario.

First, a generic method for target track maintenance, the BF-HMap approach, is proposed based on the Bayesian filtering method and the hospitability map . An advanced version of this approach with much less computational and memory load using a particle filter, the PF-HMap algorithm, is also introduced in this work. Both BF-HMap and PF-HMap are capable of exploiting non-analytic prior environmental knowledge as well as handling intermittent and regional measurements caused by the coverage and motion constraints on MSAs. Meanwhile, a generalized particle filter for both in-sequence and out-of-sequence measurements is developed for possible extensions of the PF-HMap algorithm to distributed MSA networks.

Secondly, the MSA motion-control problem is studied in such an information-theoretic way that the conditional entropy (i.e. given the measurements) of the target state is chosen as a generic performance metric. Several key properties of the evolution of the entropy are identified, which are further exploited to model the sensor management problem in two cases of studies: target search and target surveillance, which are modeled as a stabilization problem of the entropy and an optimization problem to minimize the average revisit time on each target, respectively. Based on that, a necessary condition and a sufficient condition by means of the number of MSAs to perform a non-escape search for a moving target are derived. In the meantime, a cooperative on-line motion-planning approach for multi-target surveillance by multiple non-holonomic MSAs is proposed.

The dissertation concludes with a summary of the current work and a discussion on possible extensions of the proposed methodologies in future work.

Umit Ozguner (Advisor)
184 p.

Recommended Citations

Citations

  • Tang, Z. (2005). Information-theoretic management of mobile sensor agents [Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University]. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1126882086

    APA Style (7th edition)

  • Tang, Zhijun. Information-theoretic management of mobile sensor agents. 2005. Ohio State University, Doctoral dissertation. OhioLINK Electronic Theses and Dissertations Center, http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1126882086.

    MLA Style (8th edition)

  • Tang, Zhijun. "Information-theoretic management of mobile sensor agents." Doctoral dissertation, Ohio State University, 2005. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc_num=osu1126882086

    Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition)