Approximate stochastic dynamic programming for sensor scheduling to track multiple targets

The problem of sensor scheduling is to select the number and combination of sensors to activate over time. The goal is usually to trade off tracking performance and sensor usage. We formulate a version of this problem involving multiple targets as a partially observable Markov decision process, and use this formulation to develop a nonmyopic sensor-scheduling scheme. Our scheme integrates sequential multisensor joint probabilistic data association and particle filtering for belief-state estimation, and use a simulation-based Q-value approximation method called completely observable rollout for decision making. We illustrate the effectiveness of our approach by an example with multiple sensors activated simultaneously to track multiple targets. We also explore the trade-off between tracking error and sensor cost using our nonmyopic scheme.