Athena Technologies, Incorporated (Athena) in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute (CMU) is pleased to submit this Phase II proposal in continuation of the Phase I effort where we successfully demonstrated proof-of-concept (POC) Visual Augmented Inertial Navigation System (VAINS) to accurately generate high bandwidth velocity, position and attitude of an air vehicle in the case of extended absence of GPS. The Phase I effort addressed a number of issues involving extraction and tracking of natural terrain features, use of synthetic images for testing purposes, and demonstrating feasibility of the entire VAINS concept to achieve INS accuracy equivalent to performance when GPS is available full time. The objective of this Phase II effort is to maturate the VAINS architecture and achieve robust and accurate navigation performance while flying over various types of real natural terrain, under different lighting conditions, flight speeds and altitudes, with poor GPS coverage. In addition to finalizing the implementation of the algorithms, a key deliverable of the Phase II effort will be an optimal hardware design configuration to perform the VAINS functionality.
Keywords: Visual Odometry, Flight Control System , Position And Attitude Determination, Kalman Filtering
