Information theoretic sensor management

Sensor management may be defined as those stochastic control problems in which control values are selected to influence sensing parameters in order to maximize the utility of the resulting measurements for an underlying detection or estimation problem. While problems of this type can be formulated as a dynamic program, the state space of the program is in general infinite, and traditional solution techniques are inapplicable. Despite this fact, many authors have applied simple heuristics such as greedy or myopic controllers with great success. This thesis studies sensor management problems in which information theoretic quantities such as entropy are utilized to measure detection or estimation performance. The work has two emphases: Firstly, we seek performance bounds which guarantee performance of the greedy heuristic and derivatives thereof in certain classes of problems. Secondly, we seek to extend these basic heuristic controllers to nd algorithms that provide improved performance and are applicable in larger classes of problems for which the performance bounds do not apply. The primary problem of interest is multiple object tracking and identification; application areas include sensor network management and multifunction radar control.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Williams, Jason L

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• John W. Fisher, III and Alan S. Willsky.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/38534

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/38534