An Open, Modular, and Standardized Testing Architecture for Alternative Navigation Technology relevant to Hypersonic and Supersonic Platforms

Access to reliable Position, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) is essential for Department of Defense missions, particularly as adversarial technologies challenge the effectiveness of the Global Positioning System (GPS). This necessitates the development of alternative navigation technologies that can effectively integrate various information sources, including inertial sensors, magnetic readings, LEO satellite signals, and terrain mapping. To address this need, Spectral Energies (SE) developed a navigation system, which fuses magnetic field measurements and inertial data. Additionally, SE created sensor models to simulate performance under hypersonic conditions. The simulations demonstrated that the system offers an enhanced navigation capability in the absence of GPS compared to IMUs alone. Moreover, a data collection system was built to gather magnetic, inertial, and GPS data in flight, reinforcing the potential of this hybrid navigation approach for future applications. SE will extend this modular system into an open standard system architecture that will allow vendors to quickly and cost-effectively test their technology. Ultimately SE’s methodology can be incorporated into a MACH-TB flight to allow vendors to test their technology on a flight system. Ultimately, the proposed standard testing architecture will allow one to test and validate new navigation technology quicker and get it into the hands of the warfighter.