Technology Enhancement for Robust and Reliable Absolute Navigation (TERRANav)

This proposal will create a robust, low-cost multi-sensor navigation system for AUGVs called the Technology Enhancement for Robust and Reliable Absolute Navigation (TERRANav). TERRANav will integrate inertial, magnetic, EO/IR, and LIDAR sensors with a priori databases to reduce absolute localization errors in GPS-denied locations. This approach is fundamentally different than a traditional GPS/INS system because it incorporates non-GPS sensing modalities that exploit structure in the environment to measure an absolute position in the world. These additional sensing methods bound the errors generated by the inertial system when GPS is denied. TERRANav gracefully handles GPS outages by intelligently combining the best absolute positioning estimates from a variety of localization methods. During Phase I, we will lay out the concept architecture and localization methods for a robust, low-cost multi-sensor navigation system. We will also run initial in-lab tests of some of these methods using collected data. Phase I will be restricted to initial software designs, in-lab testing, and feasibility investigations. During the Phase I Option, software development and testing will start to transition from the lab to the field.