What is this frog doing here?
Accomodations
  Call for Papers
  Paper Submission
  Registration
  Program
  Tutorials
  Professional Advacement Activities
  Organizing Committe
  Sponsors
  Organizers
  Coming to Puerto Rico
  Tours
  Contacts
   

 
Sensor Data Fusion and Integration with Applications to Target Tracking and Robotics
 
Lecturer(s)
M. Farooq
 

Sensor integration and registration is a prerequisites to exploiting the inherent advantages of multi-sensor systems over single sensor systems. Using a single sensor, we can monitor objects with a precision and accuracy that depended on the sensor characteristics. By using multiple sensors to observe and object, we can obtain multiple viewpoints, extended coverage both spatially and temporally, reduce the ambiguity and obtain more precise estimate of object kinematics than that is possible through the best individual sensor. Engineers can replace a single very expensive sensor with many cheaper sensors in a tracking scenario or employ a variety of sensor to construct a complete view of the robot's environment. This certainly is the case with of a netted sensory system. For example, a single sensor may have a blind azimuth *screening angle) which an adjacent sensor may cover. In those areas where sensor coverage overlaps, the quality of which not only improve our estimate of object kinematics, but also help with its detection when the environment is changing. Form the military point of view, multiple sensors provide diverse information, which can be used by the decision-makers to derive an appropriate response to perceived threats. As the number of threats, or objects in robot's workspace, being monitored increases, the difficulty in maintaining techniques capable of functioning in a cluttered, dynamic environment containing the objects of interest is of fundamental importance to enhancing the survivability and usefulness of multi-sensor system.

The development and the design of Distributed Multi-Sensor environment must be based on solid understanding of the theoretical foundations and should yield required performance in a control simulation environment. To this end, the tutorial will provide an overview of the integration and registration issues in a distributed sensory environment and point out some of the outstanding problems that need to be addressed and the challenges that still remain. Besides discussing the conventional techniques to resolve the sensor integration and registration issues, non-conventional approaches, such as Neural Networks and Fuzzy Logic based methods will also be explored. The formulation of the problem is light of these techniques will be discussed in detail. In addition, the design of a versatile simulation environment to evaluate the sensor integration techniques will be presented and the benefits of fusing the kinematics and non-kinematics information will be demonstrated through simulation results.

 
Code: 4E
 
Cost: US $150 (Please check tutorials fees)
 
 

M. Farooq received his BscEng and MTech degrees from Punjab Engineering College, Chandigarh, India and the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi in 1965 and 1967, respectively, and his PhD from the University of New Brunswick, Canada, in 1974, all in Electrical Engineering. In March 1980, he joined the Royal Military College of Canada (RMC), Kingston , Ontario , where he is currently a professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. During 1998-1999, he was on Sabbatical at the Computing Devices Canada Ltd. (CDC), a General Dynamics Company, where he was involved in Technology Transfer between RMC and CDC in the areas of Target Tracking and Sensor Data Fusion, with possible applications to the Swedish's coastal sonar Defense systems, a contract recently awarded to CDC. During his Sabbatical in 1991-1992 at Thomson-CSF Canada , he was instrumental in preparing proposals for a number of research projects in the area Multisensor Multitarget Tracking and securing the necessary funding on these projects.
 

He has organized as well as served as technical chair on a number of conferences on Applications of Advance Technologies to Canadian Forces, and served as a Co-Editor of the resulting Conference Proceedings. He continues to be a member of the Steering Committee of the Midwest Symposium on Circuits and Systems. He has served on a number of Program Committees on various International Conferences, such as the Conference Editorial Board of the IEEE Control Society, the IEEE Industrial Electronics Conferences, the Internal Society for Optical Engineering (SPIE Conferences), Fusion '98, '99, '2000, '2002 and '2003 to name a few. In 1998, he was nominated as a candidate to the First Board of Directors of the International Society of Information Fusion. He has also been appointed to the Editorial Board of the International Journal on Multisensor Information Fusion published by Elservier Science S.A. He was a member of the Defense Advisory Board ( Canada ) which drafted a report on Fusion Technology in Canada . He has presented a number of invited lectures on Sensor Fusion Technology and its Applications. He has served as a Consultant to a number of Defense Consulting Companies in Canada . He has been instrumental in establishing a research group on Multisensor Multitarget Tracking at RMC. He holds a number of research contracts on various aspects on Target Tracking, Robotics, Motor Control and Drives and Sensor Data Fusion and has published numerous technical papers in these areas.

 
 
 




 
August 6 - 9 , 2006, The San Juan Marriott Hotel. San Juan, Puerto Rico