Perception management for the guidance of unmanned vehicles

A review of multi-sensor management for sensor fusion as applied to the guidance of unmanned vehicles is presented. The need for something more than sensor management is presented introducing the concept of perception management. The concept is information-oriented and looks into the supervision and control of multi-sensors with the purpose of enhancing the perception process. This paper proposes two perception management methods: (i) means to measure performance through the use of information theory based techniques and, (ii) a query oriented supervision system that reconfigures sensors as a function of the system operation mode and the performance being attained by all the combined sensors. In addition the concept of a design framework of perception management is outlined