Knapsack-based Online Sensor Selection for Vehicle State Estimation

As connected and autonomous driving technologies advance, vehicles increasingly rely on data from external sensors. Although this information can enhance state estimation, processing all available streams imposes significant communication and computational costs. To address this challenge, we introduce a Sensor Management Center (SMC) that selects a low-cost subset of external sensors in real time while satisfying chance-constrained error bounds derived from an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) covariance. We formulate the selection problem as a multidimensional minimum knapsack problem and adopt a deficiency-weighted greedy algorithm as an approximate yet efficient solution. The proposed approach is validated through MATLAB simulations and experiments on a 1:15-scale cooperative driving testbed.