Sensors, Data Fusion and Intelligence - Decentralised Systems for the Spacecraft Skylon

Sensing systems play a very important role in many aspects of modern life, including their use in appliances for our homes, monitoring systems for manufacturing and processing plants, and navigation systems on planes and ships. They have also been used extensively for sea and space exploration. Such systems often have a selection of sensors for collecting a variety of information, like Skylon.

This research will help pave the way for the development of a software structure which manages a decentralised multi-sensor system, capable of fusing gathered data and using it as a basis for making decisions. Decentralised systems, where processing is spread out, have a great many advantages over more traditional systems including robustness, timeliness and fault tolerance. The use of a multi-agent framework provides a suitable solution for handling operations, such as communication, needed on such systems. 

In summary we are looking for optimal control strategies that are decentralised and scalable, where local decisions and the exchange of information can be made without a central decision maker. It would be a great feat of engineering to produce software that, following installation, learned about its resources and was then capable of monitoring and manipulating its environment in an intelligent and useful manner.

 

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