Confidence fusion

Abstract

The field of sensor fusion is well developed, but approaches to describing the confidence one ought to have in the fused result as a function of the confidence one has in the individual measurements is not. This speculative paper is intended to stimulate discussion in the robotics and instrumentation communities regarding how to approach "confidence fusion" in a way that can be practically applied in robotics applications and is intuitively satisfying with respect our feelings regarding how confidence in measurements ought to propagate. Preliminary ideas are developed in the context of a scenario wherein two one-bit-output sensors in which we have different confidence are used together. The results are compared with numerical experiments simulating a real-life experiment that we have described in the field of sensor fusion for context-aware computing.