Navigation Solutions by Terrain Imaging

"Athena Technologies, Incorporated (Athena) and Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute (CMU) propose to exploit use of visual odometry capabilities via real-time computer vision, to augment inertial sensors, 3D magnetometer and GPS to determine thevelocity, position and attitude of a missile or unmanned air vehicle. The proposed architecture exploits the excellent performance Athena has demonstrated to date with the GuideStar system, which provides a full navigation and attitude solution from a 16state nonlinear extended Kalman filter, using low grade MEMS technology inertial sensors. This proposal will explore augmenting of this navigation/attitude solution by incorporating CMU's visual odometry signals that are the processed output from digitalimaging of local terrain video. With this additional sensing modality, the navigation and attitude solution stands a good chance of improved performance under GPS outage conditions. Athena foresees a large potential market in the application ofvision-based flight control systems to both military unmanned and general aviation air vehicles. Vision-based FCS will enable autonomous obstacle managment for autonomous docking, perching and landing on runways in visible, IR or active SAR spectrum."