Date of Award

3-1-2018

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science in Electrical Engineering

Department

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Aaron J. Canciani, PhD.

Abstract

This research explores the viability of using a navigation system that relies on measurements of the magnetic anomaly field as an alternative to GPS navigation. Previous research has been conducted on developing a navigation system using the intensity of the Earth's magnetic anomaly field as an alternative signal. This research focuses on using vector and tensor measurements, as opposed to scalar measurements of the anomaly field, as a means of obtaining accurate position and orientation solutions. This paper presents two navigation systems. The first uses an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) with vector measurements of the magnetic anomaly field to aid an inertial navigation system (INS), while the second uses tensor measurements. Simulations examine the performance of both navigation systems in sixteen scenarios. The parameters evaluated in the simulations include the position and velocity of the trajectory, whether vector or tensor measurements are used, the quality of the INS paired with the filter, and the map resolution. Simulations demonstrate that the tensor measurement filter paired with a navigation-grade INS performed best out of the sixteen test cases. For a one-hour ship trajectory, the navigation system was able to demonstrate 35.94 m DRMS error when paired with a navigation-grade INS. The same navigation system was able to obtain navigation accuracies of 38.10 m DRMS when paired with a 10X-grade INS for a 25 hour ship trajectory with a lower resolution magnetic field map due to the depth of the ocean.

AFIT Designator

AFIT-ENG-MS-18-M-049

DTIC Accession Number

AD1056198

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