ARETE ASSOCIATES — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: N222-089

Description

Areté proposes to develop and deliver Hyperion Auto Finder (Hyperion-AF), a passive, fully automated electro-optic celestial navigation payload for the LRUSV, enabling safe and autonomous navigation in GPS-denied or -degraded environments. Hyperion-AF leverages Areté’s “Hyperion” Celestial Navigation technology developed and demonstrated for submarines using an onboard periscope and processing architecture under N151-032, “Submarine Navigation in a GPS-Denied Environment.” Hyperion-AF will provide the LRUSV real-time streaming localization data including latitude, longitude, time, and confidence fields, while ingesting onboard inertial navigation system (INS) “dead-reckoning” heading information. Hyperion-AF will be designed to meet all LRUSV physical, functional, and environmental requirements and will enable safe, day and night autonomous navigation in GPS denied or degraded environments without revealing location information to potential adversaries. Hyperion-AF can also be used on manned and unmanned commercial vessels of many different types. In particular, it could be used as a complement to and backup for unmanned navigation systems that rely on GPS, GLONASS, and/or Galileo. The Hyperion-AF payload can also provide autonomous situational awareness enabling surveillance, obstacle detection, and collision avoidance with future firmware upgrades.