Foundations and Applications of Sensor Management

Active sensing is recognized as an enabling technology for the next generation of agile, multi-modal, and multi-waveform sensor platforms to efficiently perform tasks such as target detection, tracking, and identification. Recently, several research programs at DARPA (SWARMS, ISP), ARO (MURI), and AFOSR (ATR MURI) have funded efforts in areas related to active sensing. These resulted in focused efforts by several research groups in academia, government laboratories, and industry. These efforts have led to advances in theory and implementation that have borne some fruit in specific technology areas. For example, several promising new methods to approximate optimal multistage sensor management strategies for target tracking have been developed and an understanding of design challenges and performance tradeoffs is beginning to emerge. This book introduces the area, takes stock of these advances, and describes open problems and challenges in order to advance the field.