Five Focal LLC — Department of Defense SBIR Phase II: Accurate Position Location Information (PLI) enables deployment and coordination of ground

Description

Accurate Position Location Information (PLI) enables deployment and coordination of ground-based assets, e.g. soldiers and ground vehicles, and is required for safe and effective completion of diverse missions. PLI from computer machine vision, e.g. visual navigation, has the potential to replace GPS in urban, indoor, high cover, and jammed GPS environs. An additional benefit to visual navigation is that the system may be configured to continuously upgrade maps of explored surroundings for improved situational awareness and intel briefing prior to subsequent asset deployment. The primary failure modes of any visual odomentry system will be under conditions of 1) rapid motion which degrades or interrupts good feature flow, 2) sparse features, 3) large acceleration, and 4) due to translation/rotation ambiguity. FiveFocals proposed solution is a soldier-mounted imaging system with compact custom optics and feature detectors that is optimized to overcome the current failure modes and to provide richer information to robust localization and mapping algorithms"the vision and mapping system will fit into a smart phone size footprint.