Particle filter approximations for general open loop and open loop feedback sensor management

Sensor management is a stochastic control problem where the control mechanism is directed at the generation of observations. Typically, sensor management attempts to optimize a certain statistic derived from the posterior distribution of the state, such as covariance or entropy. However, these statistics often depend on future measurements which are not available at the moment the control decision is taken, making it necessary to consider their expectation over the entire measurement space. Though the idea of computing such expectations using a particle filter is not new, so far it has been applied only to specific sensor management problems and criterions. In this memorandum, for a considerably broad class of problems, we explicitly show how particle filters can be used to approximate general sensor management criterions in the open loop and open loop feedback cases. As examples, we apply these approximations to selected sensor management criterions. As an additional contribution of this memorandum, we show that every performance metric can be used to define a corresponding estimate and a corresponding task-driven sensor management criterion, and both of them can be approximated using particle filters. This is used to propose an approximate sensor management scheme based on the OSPA metric for multitarget tracking, which is included among our examples.