Geomagnetic Sensor Fusion for Alternative Positioning and Navigation

Abstract

The long term vision of the PI is to establish a research program focused on the design and synthesis of advanced autonomous systems for various civilian and military applications of interest to various mission agencies. Robust positioning and orientation estimation is an important area of research to alleviate the increasing reliance of autonomous vehicles on the Global Positioning System (GPS). A research program at the confluence of modeling, analysis and field experiments is proposed to study mathematics and methods associated with estimation of position and heading of an autonomous system using magnetic field measurements of the Earth. Mathematical techniques that exploit recent advances in pattern analysis and machine intelligence to efficiently represent geomagnetic field signatures are studied. The efficient representations are subsequently utilized for localizing the vehicle in a GPS-denied environment. Proposed research also investigates health metrics to ascertain the quality of the positioning and heading estimate directly from the data. These measures can thus be utilized the guidance and control system of the platform to take appropriate actions to improve the resolution and accuracy of the positioning information. Numerical simulations will be utilized to evaluate the approaches proposed in this research. Embedded computing implementations will be utilized to evaluate the utility and efficiency of the alternative positioning and navigation approaches proposed in this work. Studies to trade-off algorithm performance with computational complexity, processing speed and memory needs will aid in transitioning the proposed work to practice. Extensive field experiments are proposed to demonstrate the utility of the alternative positioning technologies realized in the proposed project.

Document Details

Document Type
DoD Grant Award
Publication Date
Oct 06, 2020
Source ID
HM04761912015

Entities

People

  • Manoranjan Majji

Organizations

  • National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency
  • Texas Engineering Experiment Station

Tags

Readers

  • Distributed Systems and Data Platform Development
  • Sensor Fusion and Tracking Systems.
  • Systems Analysis and Design

Technology Areas

  • Autonomy
  • Space