Information-sharing and decision-making in networks of radiation detectors

A network of sensors observes a time-inhomo-geneous Poisson signal and within a fixed time interval has to decide between two hypotheses regarding the signal’s intensity. The paper reveals an interplay between network topology, essentially determining the quantity of information available to different sensors, and the quality of individual sensor information as captured by the sensor’s likelihood ratio. Armed with analytic expressions of bounds on the error probabilities associated with the binary hypothesis test regarding the intensity of the observed signal, the insight into the interplay between sensor communication and data quality helps in deciding which sensor is better positioned to make a decision on behalf of the network, and links the analysis to network centrality concepts. The analysis is illustrated on networked radiation detection examples, first in simulation and then on cases utilizing field measurement data available through a U.S. Domestic Nuclear Detection Office (dndo) database.     

Controlled tracking in urban terrain: Closing the loop

We investigate the challenging problem of integrating detection, signal processing, target tracking, and adaptive waveform scheduling with lookahead in urban terrain. We propose a closed‐loop active sensing system to address this problem by exploiting three distinct levels of diversity: (1) spatial diversity through the use of coordinated multistatic radars; (2) waveform diversity by adaptively scheduling the transmitted waveform; and (3) motion model diversity by using a bank of parallel filters matched to different motion models. Specifically, at every radar scan, the waveform that yields the minimum trace of the one‐step‐ahead error covariance matrix is transmitted; the received signal goes through a matched‐filter, and curve fitting is used to extract range and range‐rate measurements that feed the LMIPDA‐VSIMM algorithm for data association and filtering. Monte Carlo simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed system in an urban scenario contaminated by dense and uneven clutter, strong multipath, and limited line‐of‐sight.     

Including probabilistic target detection attributes into map representations

Range measuring sensors can play an extremely important role in robot navigation. All range measuring devices rely on a ‘detection criterion’ made in the presence of noise, to determine when the transmitted signal is considered detected and hence a range reading is obtained. In commonly used sensors, such as laser range finders and polaroid sonars, the criterion under which successful detection is assumed, is kept hidden from the user. However, ‘detection decisions’ on the presence of noise still take place within the sensor. This paper integrates signal detection probabilities into the map building process which provides the most accurate interpretation of such sensor data. To facilitate range detection analysis, map building with a frequency modulated continuous wave millimetre wave radar (FMCW MMWR), which is able to provide complete received power-range spectra for multiple targets down range is considered. This allows user intervention in the detection process and although not directly applicable to the commonly used ‘black-box’ type range sensors, provides insight as to how not only range values, but received signal strength values should be incorporated into the map building process.This paper presents two separate methods of map building with sensors which return both range and received signal power information. The first is an algorithm which uses received signal-to-noise power to make an estimates of the range to multiple targets down range, without any signal distribution assumptions. We refer to this as feature detection based on target presence probability (TPP). In contrast to the first method, the second method does use assumptions on the statistics of the signal in target presence and absence scenarios to formulate a probabilistic likelihood detector. This allows for an increased rate of convergence to ground truth. Evidence theory is then introduced to model and update successive observations in a recursive fashion. Both methods are then compared using real MMWR data sets from indoor and outdoor experiments.     

Nonlinear filtering in target tracking using cooperative mobile sensors

Collaborative signal processing and sensor deployment have been among the most important research tasks in target tracking using networked sensors. In this paper, the mathematical model is formulated for single target tracking using mobile nonlinear scalar range sensors. Then a sensor deployment strategy is proposed for the mobile sensors and a nonlinear convergent filter is built to estimate the trajectory of the target.     

Coordination of multiple mobile robots with limited communication range in pursuit of single mobile target in cluttered environment

This paper addresses the problem of coordinating multiple mobile robots in searching for and capturing a mobile target, with the aim of reducing the capture time. Compared with the previous algorithms, we assume that the target can be detected by any robot and captured successfully by two or more robots. In this paper, we assume that each robot has a limited communication range. We maintain the robots within a mobile network to guarantee the successful capture. In addition, the motion of the target is modeled and incorporated into directing the motion of the robots to reduce the capture time. A coordination algorithm considering both aspects is proposed. This algorithm can greatly reduce the expected time of capturing the mobile target. Finally, we validate the algorithm by the simulations and experiments.     

Information-theoretic bounds on target recognition performancebased on degraded image data

This paper derives bounds on the performance of statistical object recognition systems, wherein an image of a target is observed by a remote sensor. Detection and recognition problems are modeled as composite hypothesis testing problems involving nuisance parameters. We develop information-theoretic performance bounds on target recognition based on statistical models for sensors and data, and examine conditions under which these bounds are tight. In particular, we examine the validity of asymptotic approximations to probability of error in such imaging problems. Problems involving Gaussian, Poisson, and multiplicative noise, and random pixel deletions are considered, as well as least-favorable Gaussian clutter. A sixth application involving compressed sensor image data is considered in some detail. This study provides a systematic and computationally attractive framework for analytically characterizing target recognition performance under complicated, non-Gaussian models and optimizing system parameters     

Autonomous mobile robot dynamic motion planning using hybrid fuzzy potential field

A new fuzzy-based potential field method is presented in this paper for autonomous mobile robot motion planning with dynamic environments including static or moving target and obstacles. Two fuzzy Mamdani and TSK models have been used to develop the total attractive and repulsive forces acting on the mobile robot. The attractive and repulsive forces were estimated using four inputs representing the relative position and velocity between the target and the robot in the x and y directions, in one hand, and between the obstacle and the robot, on the other hand. The proposed fuzzy potential field motion planning was investigated based on several conducted MATLAB simulation scenarios for robot motion planning within realistic dynamic environments. As it was noticed from these simulations that the proposed approach was able to provide the robot with collision-free path to softly land on the moving target and solve the local minimum problem within any stationary or dynamic environment compared to other potential field-based approaches.     

Path planning in GPS-denied environments via collective intelligence of distributed sensor networks

This paper proposes a framework for reactive goal-directed navigation without global positioning facilities in unknown dynamic environments. A mobile sensor network is used for localising regions of interest for path planning of an autonomous mobile robot. The underlying theory is an extension of a generalised gossip algorithm that has been recently developed in a language-measure-theoretic setting. The algorithm has been used to propagate local decisions of target detection over a mobile sensor network and thus, it generates a belief map for the detected target over the network. In this setting, an autonomous mobile robot may communicate only with a few mobile sensing nodes in its own neighbourhood and localise itself relative to the communicating nodes with bounded uncertainties. The robot makes use of the knowledge based on the belief of the mobile sensors to generate a sequence of way-points, leading to a possible goal. The estimated way-points are used by a sampling-based motion planning algorithm to generate feasible trajectories for the robot. The proposed concept has been validated by numerical simulation on a mobile sensor network test-bed and a Dubin’s car-like robot.     

扩展目标跟踪的PCRLB

在杂波和漏检的环境下针对扩展目标估计的性能评价问题, 提出求扩展目标跟踪估计的后验克拉美罗界(PCRLB) 的方法. 该方法假设单个扩展目标的量测个数服从泊松分布, 杂波的个数也服从泊松分布, 给出在有漏检和杂波环境下求PCRLB 的方法—–信息约减因子法(IRF). 算例展示了不同的检测概率和杂波密度对PCRLB 的影响. 仿真结果表明, 所提出方法能有效反映扩展目标跟踪所能达到的最优性能, 检测概率越高, PCRLB 越小; 杂波密度越大, PCRLB 越大.

     

Stochastic Event Capture Using Mobile Sensors Subject to a Quality Metric

Mobile sensors cover more area over a fixed period of time than do the same number of stationary sensors. However, the quality of coverage (QoC) achieved by mobile sensors depends on the velocity, mobility pattern, number of mobile sensors deployed, and the dynamics of the phenomenon being sensed. The gains attained by mobile sensors over static sensors and the optimal motion strategies for mobile sensors are not well understood. In this paper, we consider the following event capture problem: the events of interest arrive at certain points in the sensor field and disappear according to known arrival and departure time distributions. An event is said to be captured if it is sensed by one of the mobile sensors before it fades away. We analyze how the QoC scales with velocity, path, and number of mobile sensors. We characterize cases where the deployment of mobile sensors has no advantage over static sensors, and find the optimal velocity pattern that a mobile sensor should adopt. We also present algorithms for two motion planning problems: 1) for a single sensor, what is the sensor trajectory and the minimum speed required to satisfy a bound on the event loss probability and 2) for sensors with fixed speed, what is the minimum number of sensors required to satisfy a bound on the event loss probability. When the robots are restricted to move along a line or a closed curve, our algorithms return the optimal velocity for the minimum velocity problem. For the minimum sensor problem, the number of sensors used is within a factor of 2 of the optimal solution. For the case where the events occur at arbitrary points on a plane, we present heuristic algorithms for the aforementioned motion planning problems and bound their performance with respect to the optimal.     

基于局部显著度的机动弱小目标检测算法

由于待检测的红外远距离目标具有尺寸小、辐射低、背景复杂等检测难点,以高检测率、低虚警率、高实时性进行红外小目标检测一直是一个具有挑战性的课题；文章提出一种基于局部显著性的变速运动目标累积检测算法,利用辐射能量积累方法提高目标在背景中的信噪比；首先,建立矢量空间及一阶导数空间,对序列图像的每帧进行基于块显著度的局部对比度增强处理,增强目标辐射能量并抑制背景,同时显著减少了计算量；然后,进行变速运动空间及导数矢量空间的辐射能量叠加,在空间矢量及导数矢量空间中检测序列图像中的目标在矢量空间及导数矢量空间运动特征的存在概率；最后,通过恒虚警检测得到目标的位置向量、速度、加速度向量,完成目标检测；实验结果验证了提出方法的有效性,其检测率及虚警率均优于其他方法,其中信杂比增益提高了22.30,背景抑制因子提高了3775.68,处理时间开销降低了0.65秒；     

Fuzzy target tracking control of autonomous mobile robots by using infrared sensors

The theme of this paper is to design a real-time fuzzy target tracking control scheme for autonomous mobile robots by using infrared sensors. At first two mobile robots are setup in the target tracking problem, where one is the target mobile robot with infrared transmitters and the other one is the tracker mobile robot with infrared receivers and reflective sensors. The former is designed to drive in a specific trajectory. The latter is designed to track the target mobile robot. Then we address the design of the fuzzy target tracking control unit, which consists of a behavior network and a gate network. The behavior network possesses the fuzzy wall following control (FWFC) mode, fuzzy target tracking control (FTTC) mode, and two fixed control modes to deal with different situations in real applications. Both the FWFC and FTTC are realized by the fuzzy sliding-mode control scheme. A gate network is used to address the fusion of measurements of two infrared sensors and is developed to recognize which situation is belonged to and which action should be executed. Moreover, the target tracking control with obstacle avoidance is also investigated in this paper. Both computer simulations and real-time implementation experiments of autonomous target tracking control demonstrate the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed control schemes.     

Optimal spatial formation of swarm robotic gas sensors in odor plume finding

Finding the best spatial formation of stationary gas sensors in detection of odor clues is the first step of searching for olfactory targets in a given space using a swarm of robots. Considering no movement for a network of gas sensors, this paper formulates the problem of odor plume detection and analytically finds the optimal spatial configuration of the sensors for plume detection, given a set of assumptions. This solution was analyzed and verified by simulations and finally experimentally validated in a reduced scale realistic environment using a set of Roomba-based mobile robots.     

Optimal sensor placement and motion coordination for target tracking

This work studies optimal sensor placement and motion coordination strategies for mobile sensor networks. For a target-tracking application with range sensors, we investigate the determinant of the Fisher Information Matrix and compute it in the 2D and 3D cases, characterizing the global minima in the 2D case. We propose motion coordination algorithms that steer the mobile sensor network to an optimal deployment and that are amenable to a decentralized implementation. Finally, our numerical simulations illustrate how the proposed algorithms lead to improved performance of an extended Kalman filter in a target-tracking scenario.     

具有运动伪迹消除功能的移动心电检测系统设计

设计并实现了一种可在人体移动状态下进行检测、采集及分析人体心电信号的系统,硬件设计上,采用高集成度专用心电信号前端处理集成电路进行心电信号的滤波及放大;软件设计上,采用小波阈值降噪对心电信号进行初级滤波,然后采用人体移动加速度传感器获取人体运动信息对心电信号进行自适应滤波,消除运动伪迹.在系统设计上,终端检测设备与手机终端采用蓝牙通信,便于用户测量.实验结果表明:本设计方案能根据人体运动状况,有效消除运动伪迹,保留心电信号的波形,可满足常规的移动心电检测应用.     

基于二元多跳WSN的信道容错的目标定位方法

针对信道退化的多跳无线传感器网络下的定位问题,基于最大似然估计提出一种新的信道容错的定位算法.传感器节点接收到的源信号强度数据被压缩量化为二元信号,经Rayleigh退化信道多跳中继到达融合中心.利用信道退化统计量和译码策略,推导出二元观测数据的似然函数,基于最大似然估计获得目标定位,进一步给出目标位置估计的克拉美-罗下界.仿真结果表明了所提出算法的有效性.     

Classifying the multi robot path finding problem into a quadratic competitive complexity class

We explore two motion planning problems where a group of mobile robots has to reach a target located in an a priori unknown environment while on-line planning the next step. In the first problem the target position is unknown and should be found by the robots, while in the second problem the target position is known and only a path to it should be found. We focus on optimizing the cost of the task in terms of motion time, which, under the assumption of uniform velocity of all the robots, correlates to the path length passed by the robot which reaches the target. The performance of an on-line algorithm is usually expressed in terms of Competitiveness, the constant ratio between the on-line and the optimal off-line solutions. Specifically, the ratio between the lengths of the actual path made by the robot which reached the target to the shortest path to the target. We use generalized competitiveness, i.e., the ratio is not necessarily constant, but could be any function. Classification of a motion planning task in the sense of performance is done by finding an upper and a lower bounds on the competitiveness of all algorithms solving that task. If the two bounds belong to the same functional class this is the Competitive Complexity Class of the task. We find the two bounds for the aforementioned common on-line motion planning problems, and classify them into competitive classes. It is shown that in general any on-line motion planning algorithm that tries to solve these problems must have at least a quadratic competitive performance. This is a lower bound of the problems. This paper describes two new on-line navigation algorithm which solve the problems under discussion. The first is called MRSAM, short for Multi-Robot Search Area Multiplication, and the second is called MRBUG, short for Multi-Robot BUG which extends Lumelsky famous BUG algorithm. Both algorithms have quadratic upper bounds, which prove that the problems they solve have quadratic upper bounds. Thus it is shown that navigation in an unknown environment by a group of robots belongs to a quadratic competitive class. MRSAM and MRBUG have a quadratic competitive performance and thus have optimal competitiveness. The algorithms’ performance is simulated in office-like environments.     

基于蜂拥控制的移动传感器网络目标跟踪算法

针对移动传感器网络中的目标跟踪问题, 以及现有控制策略在保持网络拓扑结构连通性和降低能量消耗方面存在的不足, 提出一种基于蜂拥控制的移动传感器网络目标跟踪算法. 首先, 利用网络中部分节点检测目标, 并使用卡尔曼一致性滤波算法估计目标的状态, 在获得比较精确的估计状态的同时降低能量消耗; 然后, 在蜂拥控制下传感器网络始终保持拓扑结构连通性和目标对网络可见, 同时避免节点之间发生碰撞. 仿真结果验证了所提出算法的有效性.

     

基于Golomb序列调制的目标距离速度测量方法

针对连续波激光雷达在同步测量目标距离和速度的应用中存在辐射信号上限峰值功率低、测量极限距离近的问题,提出一种基于Golomb脉冲序列调制的测量信号波形,研究该方法在道路环境中同步测量目标距离和速度的可行性。首先,以一种准连续波,即伪随机（PN）码调制为例分析连续波调制方法存在的发射信号峰值功率低的问题,在此基础上讨论Golomb序列的特征,提出使用Golomb序列调制发射信号提高发射脉冲峰值功率的方法;然后,讨论Golomb序列调制的多普勒信号频谱分析方法和基于数据累加的延迟时间定位方法,实现同步测量目标的速度和距离;最后,在道路目标产生的多普勒频率范围内,通过仿真实验验证该方法的正确性。实验结果表明,在以脉冲序列构成的对多普勒信号平均采样率远低于奈奎斯特频率的条件下,仍然可以通过快速傅里叶变换（FFT）方法获得多普勒信号的频率,从而在发射平均功率恒定的条件下极大提高单脉冲的峰值功率;另外,利用Golomb序列的不等间隔特性,通过数据累加方法可以完成对激光脉冲飞行时间的定位,在保证了速度测量的同时实现对目标距离的测量。     

Multisensor controlled robot system for recognizing and tracking moving multiple objects

This paper presents a cost-efficient, real-time vision-sensor system for identifying, locating and tracking objects that are unknown and randomly placed on a moving conveyor belt. The visual information obtained from a conventional frame-store unit and an end-effector based proximity sensor outputs are incorporated in a fuzzy-logic control algorithm to make the robotic manipulator grasp moving objects. The robot movements are going to be the result of the comparative measurements made by the sensors after the motion of the moving target is predicted and the gripper is brought into a zone close to the object to be grasped by the application of a vision system. The mobile object is traced by controlling the motion of the end-effector with an end-effector based infrared proximity sensors and conveyor position encoder by keeping the gripper's axis to pass through a median plane of the moving object. With this procedure and using the fuzzy-logic control, the system is adapted to pursue of a mobile object. Laboratory experiments are presented to demonstrate the performance of this system. ©1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.