Robust, Flexible, and Scalable Localization across Large Mobile Networks

Position, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) is a critical capability that has become indispensable to the United States military, government services, and the commercial sector.As GPS-jamming technology becomes both more widely available and less costly, it becomes increasingly more critical to provide resilient navigation and timing independent of GPS. Under this effort, Numerica Corporation proposes to develop a fully distributed and scalable algorithm to mitigate localization drift within a network of agents when GPS has been jammed.The cooperative navigation algorithm uses range measurements between pairs of agents to synergistically improve navigation accuracy at each agent. Numerica's proposed algorithm is highly flexible, capable of considering heterogeneous sensors and platforms. Further, while the proposed algorithm only assumes the existence of relative ranging between some agents, it is able to optimally integrate any additional sensing information available to any agent within the network, and efficiently propagate that information through the network to all other agents. Finally, the proposed algorithm has been designed with scalability in mind, and efficiently runs on very large networks, with total processing and communication remaining constant at each agent (independent of the size of the network).