USA As Represented by Secretary of the Navy

Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, Inc.

Richard Vaccaro

Petros T Boufounos

Mouhacine Benosman

Ahmed S Zaki

The disclosed invention provides a method that exploits the correlations in the statistical properties of one inertial sensor to another. Among the dominant noise sources, the additive noise terms for different sensors are uncorrelated, however, there may be correlations between the random drift of different sensors. The method of the present invention estimates these correlations from a finite amount of calibration data in order to calculate coefficients for the optimal linear combination of multiple sensor signals. The method is a means of combining the multiple sensor outputs to obtain a virtual sensor signal with reduced drift, and in a far more time efficient and less processor intensive way than the prior art.

Method of reducing random drift in the combined signal of an array of inertial sensors

A method plans paths of a set of mobile sensors with changeable positions and orientations in an environment. Each sensor includes a processor, an imaging system and a communication system. A desired resolution of coverage of the environment is defined, and an achieved resolution of the coverage is initialized. For each time instant and each sensor, an image of the environment is acquired using the imaging system. The achieved resolution is updated according to the image. The sensor is moved to a next position and orientation based on the achieved resolution and the desired resolution. Then, local information of the sensor is distributed to other sensors using the communication system to optimize a coverage of the environment.

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Kingston, RI, United States of America

Richard Vaccaro