Student Thesis (NPS NRP Project Related)Accurate tracks and targeting are key to providing decision-makers with the confidence to execute their missions. Increasingly, multiple intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) assets across different intelligence sources are being used to increase the accuracy of track location, resulting in the need to develop methods to exploit heterogeneous sensor data streams for better target state estimation. One of the algorithms commonly used for target state estimation is the Kalman Filter (KF) algorithm. This algorithm performs well if its covariance matrices are accurate approximations of the uncertainty in sensor measurements. Our research complements the artificial intelligence/machine learning (AI/ML) efforts the U.S. Navy is conducting by quantitatively assessing the potential of using an ML model to predict sensor measurement noise for KF state estimation. We used a computer simulation to generate sensor tracks of a single target and trained a neural network to predict sensor error. The hybrid model (ML-KF) was able to outperform our baseline KF model that uses normalized sensor errors by approximately 20% in target position estimation. Further research in enhancing the ML model with external environment variables as inputs could potentially create an adaptive state estimation system that is capable of operating in varied environment settings.NPS Naval Research ProgramThis project was funded in part by the NPS Naval Research Program.Outstanding ThesisCaptain, Singapore ArmyApproved for public release. Distribution is unlimited
