The adaptive configuration of nodes in a sensor network has the potential to improve sequential estimation performance by intelligently allocating limited sensor network resources. In addition, the use of heterogeneous sensing nodes provides a diversity of information that also enhances estimation performance. This work reviews cognitive systems and presents a cognitive fusion framework for sequential state estimation using adaptive configuration of heterogeneous sensing nodes and heterogeneous data fusion. This work also provides an application of cognitive fusion to the sequential...

Recent innovations in modern radar for designing transmitted waveforms, coupled with new algorithms for adaptively selecting the waveform parameters at each time step, have resulted in improvements in tracking performance. Of particular interest are waveforms that can be mathematically designed to have reduced ambiguity function sidelobes, as their use can lead to an increase in the target state estimation accuracy. Moreover, adaptively positioning the sidelobes can reveal weak target returns by reducing interference from stronger targets. The manuscript provides an overview of recent...