SBIR-STTR Award

Vehicle Routing and Localization Infrastructure Placement in GPS-denied Areas
Award last edited on: 10/21/2021

Sponsored Program
STTR
Awarding Agency
DOD : AF
Total Award Amount
$899,680
Award Phase
2
Solicitation Topic Code
AFX20D-TCSO1
Principal Investigator
Riten Gupta

Company Information

UtopiaCompression Corporation (AKA: UC technologies~Utopia Compression Corporation)

11150 West Olympic Boulevard Suite 820
Los Angeles, CA 90064
   (310) 473-1500
   info@utopiacompression.com
   www.utopiacompression.com

Research Institution

University of Cincinnati

Phase I

Contract Number: FA8649-21-P-0180
Start Date: 1/15/2021    Completed: 7/15/2021
Phase I year
2021
Phase I Amount
$149,752
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...

Phase II

Contract Number: FA8649-22-P-0789
Start Date: 3/11/2022    Completed: 6/12/2023
Phase II year
2022
Phase II Amount
$749,928
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.