Multi-Sensor Data Fusion Method Based on Improved Evidence Theory

To achieve autonomous navigation in complex marine environments, unmanned surface vehicles are equipped with a variety of sensors for sensing the surrounding environment and their own state. To address the issue of unsatisfactory multi-sensor information fusion in stochastic uncertain systems with unknown disturbances, an improved evidence theory multi-sensor data fusion method is proposed in this article. First, the affiliation function in fuzzy set theory is introduced as a support function to assign initial evidence for multi-sensor data, and the initial evidence is corrected according to the degree of data bias. Second, a divergence measure is employed to measure the degree of conflict and discrepancy among the evidence, and each piece of evidence is allocated proportional weight based on the conflict allocation principle. Finally, the evidence is synthesized through the evidence combination rule, and the data are weighted and summed to obtain the data fusion results. Since it is difficult to obtain dynamic information from multiple sensors carried by unmanned surface vehicles in practical applications, and considering that the proposed method has universal applicability, practical application experiments using previous research demonstrate that the proposed method has higher fusion accuracy than other existing data fusion methods.