Seminars

Radar-based terrain-aided navigation (TAN) technologies were one of the first technologies that enabled global, unambiguous navigation. Heavy development occurred between the 1960s and 1990s, but interest in the technology languished after the Global Positioning System (GPS) was declared operational in 1995. Now, there is a resurging interest in GPS-independent navigation technologies for a variety of applications, and TAN is well-positioned to address this need. To maximize this opportunity, recent advances in radar and computing technologies must be applied to the terrain-aided navigation problem, which has so far been overlooked by the digital revolution. This dissertation answers the growing calls for investment in GPS-independent technology and thrusts terrain-aided navigation into the 21st century.
This dissertation introduces the vertical synthetic aperture radar (VSAR) as a navigation sensor and develops a companion navigation algorithm -- Trusted Inertial Terrain-Aided Navigation (TITAN). TITAN consumes vector range-Doppler measurements produced by a VSAR and correlates them against a local digital terrain elevation map to determine the position and velocity of the radar, which enables accurate airborne navigation independent of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS).
The dissertation takes a system-level approach to the VSAR/TITAN proposal, which includes (1) a demonstration of the technology using post-processed flight data; (2) an analysis of the theoretical performance of the system; (3) considerations when navigation systems and synthetic aperture radar systems are tightly coupled in a feedback loop; (4) studies on the relationship between various radar parameters and navigation performance; and (5) subsystem-level improvements to terrain-aided navigation systems in general.