A Hybrid Fixed Inertial (HyFI) system for Micro Air Vehicles (MAV) with autonomous navigation and object avoidance in dense urban/indoor environments

Toyon Research Corporation proposes to develop and demonstrate Toyon’s Hybrid Fixed Inertial (HyFI) navigation sensor suite on a small unmanned aerial vehicle (SUAV) or micro air vehicle (MAV). HyFI is a compact, lightweight, self-contained position sensor that incorporates inertial measurement, ultrasonic object tracking, and passive optical sensing. HyFI is a navigation system capable of autonomously navi-gating in GPS denied areas and in dense urban/indoor environments, while providing object avoidance capability and producing unparalleled reconnaissance information on small platforms. The HyFI system uses a direct ranging acoustic sensor (BugEye) enabling navigation in GPS denied areas, autonomous navigation and object avoidance which GPS based navigation cannot do without complete ground truth. Furthermore, the HyFI system clamps navigation error as its position estimate is based on relative loca-tion to fixed objects in its environment. During the Phase II effort Toyon will integrate in hardware a pas-sive optical sensor, the HyFI navigation sensor architecture with a path following based MAV controller governed by a higher level path planning algorithm. The combination of these four systems will allow the HyFI equipped MAV to directly measure its environment optically and acoustically for the purpose of avoiding objects and producing maps with both visual and spatial information.