Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) Precision Geolocation

Our Embedded Beam Tracking and Range & Sync capabilities for Inter-Aircraft Optical Communications Links will enable free space inter-aircraft laser communication links to not only provide broadband connectivity between aircraft, it will also enable these links to provide precise inter-aircraft geolocation (full position and attitude), and payload timing synchronization. This locating and synchronization capability is critical to realizing DoD's vision of cooperative interaction of low-altitude, non-formation flying, manned/unmanned aircraft clusters, a key element in DoD's Unmanned Battlefield Architecture. In order to produce this precise inter-aircraft location and synchronization knowledge, the link's non-media dependent physical layer (NMD-PL) protocol must contain key timing, signaling and synchronization features. For this Phase I proposal, we propose to investigate and establish the feasibility of our proposed ranging, angular orientation and attitude sensing, and synchronization technique using standard communication protocols capable of transporting TCP/IP data grams. Inter-aircraft links with TCP/IP transport capability that include our innovative geolocation and synchronization technique will provide a valuable asset toward extending the current ground based Internet connectivity into unmanned airspace, the key to DoD's relieving Space Internet and GPS constellation dependence.