QUNAV LLC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: AF203-CSO2

QUNAV LLC — SBIR Phase I award from Department of Defense.

Amount
$49,955
Agency
Department of Defense · Air Force
Program / Phase
SBIR · Phase I
Topic
AF203-CSO2
Solicitation
X20.3
NAICS
Place of performance
FL
Period
2021-04-12 → 2021-07-14

Description

Recent advancements in consumer-grade MEMS inertial technology enable substantial improvements in GNSS performance via sensor-fusion and without increasing the SWAP-C. QuNav has developed a GNSS/Inertial Vehicular Engine (GIVE) that maintains seamless positioning capabilities in GNSS-challenged environments (urban canyons, tunnels and parking garages) for automotive use cases with an ultra-low SWAP-C IMU (0.0005 cubic inches, >1 gram, 1mW, $2). We propose to adapt GIVE to military users by extending it into an integrated Signal-processing GPS Enhancement System (iSAGES). iSAGES maximizes the benefits of sensor-fusion for PNT resiliency by fusing GPS and inertial data at the earliest stage possible (signal processing vs. measurement and solution processing in traditional implementations).  iSAGES can be injected into the receiver mechanization as a firmware upgrade thus minimizing the SWAP-C and streamlining the transitioning into military systems. iSAGES will incorporate two of QuNav’s key technological enablers including (i) Long Coherent Integration (LCI) that exploits inertially-aided signal processing; and, (ii) Multi-channel signal processing that accumulates signal energy over multiple satellite and frequency channels. Transitioning to military applications will be performed via our existing strategic partnership with Northrop Grumman. For civilian applications, low-cost IMU aiding software-based receiver augmentation has been utilized for weak signal recovery and interference mitigation for autonomous vehicles including self-driving cars.