2013/08/14 by Nisar Ahmed, Ahmed, Nisar, Tsung-Lin Yang +3
Computer Science · Engineering · #Computation (stat.CO) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Electrical engineering #Fault Detection and Control Systems #G.3 #Gaussian Processes and Bayesian Inference #I.2.9 #Methodology (stat.ME) #Robotics (cs.RO) #Systems and Control (eess.SY) #Target Tracking and Data Fusion in Sensor Networks #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1308.3015
openalex publication_date 2013/08/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Recent advances in communications, mobile computing, and artificial intelligence have greatly expanded the application space of intelligent distributed sensor networks. This in turn motivates the development of generalized Bayesian decentralized data fusion (DDF) algorithms for robust and efficient information sharing among autonomous agents using probabilistic belief models. However, DDF is significantly challenging to implement for general real-world applications requiring the use of dynamic/ad hoc network topologies and complex belief models, such as Gaussian mixtures or hybrid Bayesian networks. To tackle these issues, we first discuss some new key mathematical insights about exact DDF and conservative approximations to DDF. These insights are then used to develop novel generalized DDF algorithms for complex beliefs based on mixture pdfs and conditional factors. Numerical examples motivated by multi-robot target search demonstrate that our methods lead to significantly better fusion results, and thus have great potential to enhance distributed intelligent reasoning in sensor networks.