SBIR Phase I: Navigation Aiding from Mosaicked Imagery

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I research proposal addresses synergistic integration of navigation and environmental sensing instruments on manned or autonomous ground or air vehicles to both improve information registration accuracy and reduce costs of hardware. This will enable use of low cost Micro Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) Inertial Measurement Units (IMU) and will relax export requirements for remote sensing hardware heretofore based upon military-derived IMU components. This research will address the use of a digital camera and MEMS IMU that are tightly integrated in a novel manner so that navigation will occur within a coordinate frame that is fixed within the surrounding scene as observed by the digital remote sensing camera. Remote Sensing involves sensing physical properties of terrestrial objects from a distance and registering the sensed information into a geodetic reference frame. Such registration is critical for merging related data sources and for change detection from sequential data collects. Direct Geo-registration (DG) involves performing registration without prior knowledge of geodetic survey information collected from the vicinity of the sensed feature. Precision navigation using inertial navigation and GPS is a fundamental aspect of modern approaches to DG. Detection, tracking and subsequent re-acquisition of sensed features can be used as additional aides for improved navigation. This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).