2020 BRN Discussion, page-23866

AutonomousDrone Navigation System Ends Reliance on GPS

NASA's UAS traffic management expertise leads toadvances in drone navigation.

Spinoff is NASA's annual publicationfeaturing successfully commercialized NASA technology. This commercializationhas contributed to the development of products and services in the fields ofhealth and medicine, consumer goods, transportation, public safety, computertechnology, and environmental resources.

Self-piloted drone traffic may bejust over the horizon but for now, vehicles cannot legally fly beyond theoperator's line of sight — at least not without special permission. While theFederal Aviation Administration (FAA) works to craft drone regulations andengineers work to build the features that would meet those rules, some of thisnew technology is opening up applications that don't involve flying acrosstown.

For example, using unmanned aerialsystems (UAS) to inspect bridges, buildings, and other infrastructures orsurvey disaster sites doesn't necessarily require FAA compliance. An impedimentto this sort of application, though, has been reliance on the GPS signals thatsuch structures can obstruct. Without GPS, drone navigation drifts, making it difficultto register data from onboard sensors and eventually causing instability. WithNASA's help, Pittsburgh-based Near Earth Autonomy is breaking the dependencydrones have on GPS.

NASA has taken a leading role inpioneering and fostering advances necessary for safe autonomous flight,establishing in 2015 its UAS Traffic Management (UTM) project centered at AmesResearch Center. That year, Ames granted Phase I and II Small BusinessInnovation Research (SBIR) contracts to Near Earth Autonomy to build thetechnology for safe, self-piloted takeoff and landing without the use of GPS ormaps.

Near Earth Autonomy's simultaneous mapping andlocalization system builds a map of a drone's surroundings — such as thisnetwork of tunnels — while it tracks the craft's movement through thatenvironment.

As the UTM project brings on commercialpartners, it directs them to focus efforts on the areas of need it hasidentified for future autonomous air traffic. One of the challenges of dronetraffic management is the ability to operate without GPS. That's partly becauseone of the FAA's requirements will be the ability to navigate in the event of aGPS outage and because GPS signals can often be degraded at low altitudes inurban areas — exactly where the highest precision is needed.

The problem is that most automatednavigation systems start by determining their location with GPS. Devising agood alternative is challenging, not least because a small drone has limitedpower and can't carry much weight, so whatever sensors are put on a drone musthave very low size, weight, and power. Near Earth Autonomy's SBIR work focusedon safely navigating the most difficult parts of a flight — the first and last50 feet. In practice, this meant flying entire short missions with no GPS.

The company managed GPS-freenavigation with a technique known as simultaneous localization and mapping. Asit flies, the drone has to build a map of its surroundings while tracking itsown movement through that environment. An onboard LiDAR scanner senses physicalsurroundings and their distances by measuring how long laser pulses sent in alldirections take to bounce back to a sensor. Meanwhile, inertial sensors recordthe craft's movements, assisted by a camera for visual tracking. The Near EarthAutonomy team had to create their own algorithms to continually process all ofthat data and successively stitch together a map and use it to navigate. Andthe company was able to do it using small, state-of-the-art commercialcomponents, minimizing the weight and cost of the payload.

NASA will have an interest in thetechnology not just for drone traffic management but also for missions over thepoles, where GPS signals don't reach. In the long term, the capability tonavigate without GPS could help make FAA drone regulations a reality. And itcould one day enable capabilities such as autonomous urban transport.

Near Earth Autonomy has received themost interest from entities that want drones to be able to navigate near orinside large, potentially GPS-disrupting structures for disaster sitesurveillance and for inspecting buildings, tunnels, bridges, tanks, and towers.The company has sold a few prototypes and is working with commercial andgovernment entities to adapt the technology to specific applications and bringcosts down.

https://podcasts.apple.com/ug/podcast/podcast-ep-42-autonomous-helicopters-near-earth-autonomy/id1299428170?i=1000494564986

Interesting article and podcast particularly as NASA has stated in taking up the AKIDA kit that it was going to be utilised at Ames Research Centre and in the podcast the founder and head of Near Earth Autonomy seems to be hinting at the idea that they have almost got their but are missing something to make it practical and cost effective.

My opinion only DYOR.