Examination of fusion result feedback for fault-tolerant and distributed sensor systems

Future distributed applications will combine mobile and stationary sensor actuator entities as part of smart environments. Hence, a various number of intelligent sensor systems and sensor types will be available for mobile robots. We designed a programming abstraction - the Smart Abstract Entity - to deal with the diversity of data formats, measurement units, individual uncertainties, etc., in such applications. One focus of this approach was fault-tolerance in a hybrid manner. We combined centralized and decentralized mechanisms in our core concept. In this paper we discuss one aspect of the fault-tolerance concept - the feedback transmission of available fusion results to the sensor nodes, for a verification of its current state. We use a mobile robot scenario to examine the impact of this feedback approach for the position estimation and discuss parameters as well as methods for refinement.