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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Performance Enhancements Of Ranging Radio Aided Navigation, Patric J. Ernsberger Mar 2009

Performance Enhancements Of Ranging Radio Aided Navigation, Patric J. Ernsberger

Theses and Dissertations

Determining the position of team members is always useful information, whether it is a team of firefighters fighting a blaze or combatants clearing a building in the field. This information becomes even more decisive for the people responsible for their safety. To accomplish this in areas denied Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS), such as around buildings or in steep valleys, alternative methods must be used. Radio ranging systems have been a part of the navigation solution for years. They unfortunately have poor performance in certain areas, such as inside buildings, due to multipath and other errors. To improve the position …


Vision-Aided Cooperative Navigation For Multiple Unmanned Vehicles, Jason K. Bingham Mar 2009

Vision-Aided Cooperative Navigation For Multiple Unmanned Vehicles, Jason K. Bingham

Theses and Dissertations

In the recent past, a shift has taken place from manned to unmanned Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR) missions. This shift has lead to an increase in the number of unmanned vehicles (UV) operating in a theater. Additionally, removal of the crew allows for a reduction in vehicle scale, which leads to an increased ability to operate in GPS degraded environments. With the loss of GPS signals the vehicles must rely on Inertial Navigation Systems (INS) which when reduced to an appropriate size are inherently inaccurate. This research endeavors to exploit three attributes of increased UV use for ISR missions. …


Failure Detection Of A Pseudolite-Based Reference System Using Residual Monitoring, Michael A. Ciampa Mar 2009

Failure Detection Of A Pseudolite-Based Reference System Using Residual Monitoring, Michael A. Ciampa

Theses and Dissertations

The 746th TS uses a flight reference system referred to as the Central Inertial and GPS Test Facility (CIGTF) Reference System (CRS). Currently the CRS is the modern standard flight reference system for navigation testing, but high accuracy is dependent on the availability of GPS. A pseudolite system is currently being developed to augment the CRS and supply the capability to maintain high accuracy navigation under normal and jamming conditions. Pseudolite measurements typically contain cycle slips and other errors (such as multipath, tropospheric error, measurement noise) that can affect reliability. Past work relied on the receiver-reported signal-to-noise (SNR) value to …


Fusion Of Inertial Sensors And Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexed (Ofdm) Signals Of Opportunity For Unassisted Navigation, Jason G. Crosby Mar 2009

Fusion Of Inertial Sensors And Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexed (Ofdm) Signals Of Opportunity For Unassisted Navigation, Jason G. Crosby

Theses and Dissertations

The advent of the global positioning system (GPS) has provided worldwide high-accuracy position measurements. However, GPS may be rendered unavailable by jamming, disruption of satellites, or simply by signal shadowing in urban environments. Thus, this thesis considers fusion of Inertial Navigation Systems (INS) and Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexed (OFDM) signals of opportunity (SOOP) for navigation. Typical signal of opportunity navigation involves the use of a reference receiver and uses time difference of arrival (TDOA) measurements. However, by exploiting the block structure of OFDM communication signals, the need for the reference receiver is reduced or possibly removed entirely. This research uses …


Deeply-Integrated Feature Tracking For Embedded Navigation, Jeffery R. Gray Mar 2009

Deeply-Integrated Feature Tracking For Embedded Navigation, Jeffery R. Gray

Theses and Dissertations

The Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) is investigating techniques to improve aircraft navigation using low-cost imaging and inertial sensors. Stationary features tracked within the image are used to improve the inertial navigation estimate. These features are tracked using a correspondence search between frames. Previous research investigated aiding these correspondence searches using inertial measurements (i.e., stochastic projection). While this research demonstrated the benefits of further sensor integration, it still relied on robust feature descriptors (e.g., SIFT or SURF) to obtain a reliable correspondence match in the presence of rotation and scale changes. Unfortunately, these robust feature extraction algorithms are computationally …