Terrain-Relative Navigation with Neuro-Inspired Elevation Encoding

• Published in: IEEE/ION Position Location and Navigation Symposium pp. 851 - 857
• Main Authors: Michaelson, Kristen, Wang, Felix, Zanetti, Renato
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 24.04.2023
• Subjects: Dictionaries; inertial navigation; kalman filter; Neural networks; neuro-inspired; Noise measurement; Phase measurement; Position measurement; terrain-relative navigation; Time measurement; Trajectory
• ISSN: 2153-3598
• DOI: 10.1109/PLANS53410.2023.10139925

Terrain-relative autonomous navigation is a challenging task. In traditional approaches, an elevation map is carried onboard and compared to measurements of the terrain below the vehicle. These methods are computationally expensive, and it is impractical to store high-quality maps of large swaths of terrain. In this article, we generate position measurements using NeuroGrid, a recently-proposed algorithm for computing position information from terrain elevation measurements. We incorporate NeuroGrid into an inertial navigation scheme using a novel measurement rejection strategy and online covariance computation. Our results show that the NeuroGrid filter provides highly accurate state information over the course of a long trajectory.