Active Sensing for Uncertain Systems under Bounded-uncertainty Sensing Goals

This paper considers uncertain dynamic systems in which sensing is performed upon request. We introduce the concept of an active sensing policy which evaluates the current state information and determines whether or not to request sensing information. The sensing policy considered has the goal of bounding the state uncertainty in a given direction in the state space. The policy presented is shown to be a longest-wait policy, where each sensing request is necessary to prevent the uncertainty from exceeding its limit at the next time instance. The policy is presented using a slack-descriptor model to represent the state set uncertainty and dynamic uncertainty using linear constraints.