ROBOTIC RESEARCH OPCO, LLC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: AF151-181

Description

ABSTRACT:In order to obtain the time-tagged absolute position of the moving land test vehicles, the current practice is to utilize RF based navigation system that gets affected by different kinds of error sources similar to that for the GPS system. The error sources may typically be the multipath fading, atmospheric losses etc. The objective of this effort is to develop a non-RF based ground truth or reference system that will provide with time-tagged positional information for the land test vehicles with great accuracy. The reference system will be operational on multiple roads located in White Sands Missile Range (WSMR), NM and is expected to provide with the time-tagged positional accuracy of +/-5 cm/axis rms (thr), +/-1 cm/axis rms (obj) for the land test vehicles in the GPS denied area. The test vehicle speed ranges from 0 to 125 km/hr. Robotic Research proposes the High-Accuracy Multi-Sensor Surveying (HAMSS) system to enable precise localization independent of GPS or other RF signal availability. HAMSS make use of a small LADAR, EO/IR Cameras, and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) to track its absolute pose using feature registration and sensor fusion. BENEFIT:Work under HAMSS can leverage the localization technology developed under the UMAPS SBIR for WarLocTM. Both programs can leverage the technological advances of the other for leap-ahead progress. As the WarLocTM product that was developed under UMAPS is now being evaluated by SOCOM and other government and military commands for program-of-record use, technological advances can have a direct path for evaluation. The HAMSS System has applications to DoD in any sort of application that requires position/orientation information. This technology can not only be applied to guidance and tracking systems, but also ground, aerial and marine vehicles requiring high-end tactical grade IMUs. The application can span military and civilian uses for helicopters, fixed wing aircraft, platform stabilization, robotic control, spacecraft, Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROV), Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV), and surface and underwater vehicles.