Comprehensive Sky Compass

All Department of Defense branches benefit from interoperable, robust, and accurate Azimuth sensors for forward observers, snipers, artillery, increased interoperability with autonomous platforms, improved situational awareness, and increased navigation capability in GPS denied environments. Azimuth sensors are an essential component of the more general Position, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) technologies. These sensors can be integrated with advanced range finder targeting systems, both hand-held or tripod mounted. Azimuth sensors are also essential to enable new capabilities for navigation, augmented reality, increased situational awareness in the battle space, and smart weapons. Lynntech proposes the development of a miniaturized, high-accuracy and high availability azimuth sensor that fuses information from a number of celestial references to produce a reliable azimuth solution from a hand-held sensor system. This new azimuth sensor system is made possible by the recent advances in imaging technology, such as commercial-off-the-shelf miniaturized cameras, highly capable, compact, low power and reconfigurable processing platforms, such as FPGAs and GPUs, and improved small optics. Lynntech’s innovation includes robustness to partial occlusions of the sky, integrity monitoring, and graceful degradation of performance under challenging conditions.