Learning to combine multi-sensor information for context dependent state estimation

The fusion of multi-sensor information for state estimation is a well studied problem in robotics. However, the classical methods may fail to take into account the measurements validity, therefore ruining the benefits of sensor redundancy. This work addresses this problem by learning context-dependent knowledge about sensor reliability. This knowledge is later used as a decision rule in the fusion task in order to dynamically select the most appropriate subset of sensors. For this purpose we use the Mixture of Experts framework. In our application, each expert is a Kalman filter fed by a subset of sensors, and a gating network serves as a mediator between individual filters, basing its decision on sensor inputs and contextual information to reason about the operation context. The performance of this model is evaluated for altitude estimation of a UAV.