SBIR-STTR Award

Safe integration of unmanned aircraft in the national air space system will require the ability to autonomously navigate in GPS-denied environments. So called “urban canyons” are susceptible to GPS loss due to occlusions and poor visibility to multiple sa...

Autonomous vehicles are mainly reliant on GPS signals for accurate navigation. However, the unreliability of GPS in many areas including urban canyons, indoor environments, hostile territories can prove to be detrimental to autonomous missions. Fortunately, different techniques have been explored to circumvent this problem. Feature-based localization and navigation has been at the forefront of these alternate methods. One of the main drawbacks of the techniques is that there are no guarantees to the mission accuracy. This leads to several challenges in actual deployment of these algorithms on vehicles. In order to address this deficit, UtopiaCompression along with University of Cincinnati proposes to develop a system that utilizes the infrastructure-based navigation technique but provides localization accuracies before the start of the mission. This technique termed as Landmark Placement and Navigation (LPN) allows the end-users the flexibility to determine mission-specific parameters without running the application. The approach proposed is robust in nature and lightweight such that it can be deployed on smaller platforms. The approach is platform independent and can be modified for different applications.