Data Fusion for Geophysical Aided Navigation Technologies

In the proposed phase 2 effort, the GeoPhysical Aided Navigation (GPAN) particle filter based software architecture and code will be designed and built so that it has great generality and can accommodate a wide variety of INS systems and geophysical sensors. This will be accomplished by preparing the software as a set of modules - a core module containing the essential GPAN particle filter based data fusion code and a set of ancillary modules that interface the core module with the INS and with the geophysical sensors and their associated maps or models. Thus the core module will be independent of the INS and the specific geophysical sensors that are used in a particular application and, as a consequence, will not require alteration when new or different INS and geophysical sensors are used. The resulting software package will be able to accommodate any number of geophysical sensors of any type. Also, since the probability densities for the GPAN approach are not assumed Gaussian and in fact are generated and updated in the course of processing, this particular data-fusion approach is applicable to both the legacy ESGN system and the future FOGN system with errors that are predominantly random in nature and are driven by gyro ARW errors.