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The European Community's strategic research initiative in information technology (ESPRIT) has been in place for nearly five years. An early example of the pan-European collaborative projects being conducted under this initiative is 'SKIDS': Signal and Knowledge Integration with Decisional Control for Multisensory Systems. This four year project, which is approaching completion, aims to build a real-time multisensor perception machine. This machine will be capable of performing data fusion, interpretation, situation assessment, and resource allocation tasks, under the constraints of both time and resource availability, and in the presence of uncertain data. Of the many possible applications, the surveillance and monitoring of a semi-automated 'factory environment' has been chosen as a challenging and representative test scenario. This paper presents an overview of the goals and objectives of the project, the makeup of the consortium, and roles of the members within it, and the main technical achievements to data. In particular, the following are discussed: relevant application domains, and the generic requirements that can be inferred from them; sensor configuration, including choice, placement, etc.; control paradigms, including the possible trade-offs between centralized, hierarchical, and decentralized approaches; the corresponding hardware architectural choices, including the need for parallel processing; and the appropriate software architecture and infra-structure required to support the chosen task oriented approach. Specific attention is paid to the functional decomposition of the system and how the requirements for control impact the organization of the identified interpretation tasks. Future work and outstanding problems are considered in some concluding remarks. By virtue of limited space, this paper is descriptive rather than explanatory.
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