Scheduling Multiple Sensors Using Particle Filters in Target Tracking

A critical component of a multi-sensor system is sensor scheduling to optimize system performance under constraints (e.g. power, bandwidth, and computation). In this paper, we apply particle filter sequential Monte Carlo methods to implement multiple sensor scheduling for target tracking. Under the constraint that only one sensor can be used at each time step, we select a sequence of sensor uses to minimize the predicted mean-square error in the target state estimate; the predicted mean-square error is approximated using the particle filter in conjunction with an extended Kalman filter approximation. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we demonstrate the improved performance of our scheduling approach over the non-scheduling case.