Mobile-Agent-Based Collaborative Sensor Fusion Navy SBIR FY2009.1 Sol No.: Navy SBIR FY2009.1 Topic No.: N091-068 Topic Title: Mobile-Agent-Based Collaborative Sensor Fusion Proposal No.: N091-068-0225 Firm: Aurora Flight Sciences Corporation 9950 Wakeman Drive Manassas, Virginia 20110 Contact: Olivier Toupet Phone: (617) 500-4813 Web Site: www.aurora.aero Abstract: The network-centric warfare concept relies heavily on disparate sensor information, coming from the ground (e.g. special ops), the surface (including USVs), various manned and unmanned air vehicles, and space, all processed and made available on tactical and strategic networks to a variety of users. Many such sensors distributed in a littoral environment would result in a complex mesh of information, motivating fusion approaches that take into consideration the communication and energy constraints of the sensors. Such complex fusion, processing, and distribution concepts will require next-generation solutions including automated sensor tasking, information and network management, distributed data fusion, and new approaches to information distribution. Aurora is proposing to develop an approach that covers all the aspects of the solicited technology from the study of sensors and how to most efficiently combine them for multi-target tracking (MTT), to the implementation of advanced data fusion and association techniques from geographically distributed, heterogeneous sensors, to the development of a communication and energy efficient network architecture based on the innovative mobile agent concept, that will provide operators with a reliable operational picture. Aurora's experience on multi-vehicle coordination and sensor fusion for MTT puts it in a unique position to meet the challenges of this solicitation. Benefits: Today's increasingly complex information gathering tasks, such as battlefield surveillance, remote sensing, global awareness, etc., are usually time-critical, cover a large geographical area, and require reliable delivery of accurate information for their completion. Aurora sees the problem of autonomous, distributed data fusion as an opportunity to enable next-generation data fusion within its already advanced multivehicle coordination and sensor management tools, by developing and applying a key new technology: mobile agents. A mobile agent is a software process that can transport itself or its state from one platform to another, gathering and fusing data as it moves from one source of data to the next. By processing potentially large amounts of data on each platform and fusing them with existing contact/track information, communication requirements can be reduced. A `cadre' of properly designed and implemented mobile agents can work together, sharing information and executing asynchronously and autonomously. Mobile agents can also be designed to adapt dynamically to different environments/situations, enabling the heterogeneous operations inherent to network-based approaches, in some circumstances overcoming network latencies by dispatching themselves to execute tasks locally. This technology will not only find widely applicable use in all branches of the defense force, but also in commercial environments. This would include traffic flow and delay assessment, forest fire monitoring, border security, civilian search and rescue operations, weather forecast (e.g. hurricane path prediction from strategically placed UxVs), global warming studies (e.g. measuring ice thickness) or even space/Mars exploration. The Navy applications of this sensor fusion technology could include ship defense against attack aircraft and cruise missiles, and detection of modern, silent submarines -- particularly in coastal waters where land clutter can make it difficult to formulate a reliable radar picture and noisy underwater conditions reduce the efficiency of individual sonar. Return