I’m Second Lieutenant Timothy Machin. I am an electrical engineering student at AFIT. I was part of the 2016 class. My research was implementing vision-aided navigation algorithms to a small UAV. In the past, we’ve had projects that tested vision-aided navigation on large, full-scale aircraft. I, with my aero background, was interested in seeing if we could actually miniaturize the scale down to a testable UAV. At Camp Atterbury, it is military airspace, so we are allowed to fly there with the proper permissions and to conduct the tests that we need to test. I was using a single camera on a downward facing fixed-wing aircraft to determine the aircraft’s location at any point in time while it’s flying over the known terrain. For this research, we did three flight tests; all these were done at Camp Atterbury, Indiana. The goal of these was to demonstrate the full real-time implementation of the algorithm in the process. So while it was up flying, it was able to accurately determine its location without GPS. In future conflicts, it’s almost a guarantee that we’re going to have to operate in an anti-access or GPS-denied environment. So this doesn’t pose as much of a problem for manned aircraft as there’s a pilot in the loop who can take control of the aircraft if he notices that the navigation solution is off. But for UAVs that depend purely on the navigation solution in order to operate, not having a valid navigation solution could be catastrophic to the system. The goal of this system is that if there is drift between the vision solution and the navigation solution, it will switch to the vision navigation solution assuming that it’s being spoofed or jammed. So it’s more reliant and since it’s a camera, it’s passive—you can’t spoof it, jam it, you can’t send signals to intercept it and so it’s a less vulnerable method of navigation. I think the most rewarding part of this research was to finally see the end result…get those final numbers for the accuracies, to see how well they compared to the GPS we were using for the truth. With that, I know that the next person who follows on this research is just going to improve it that much more and we’re going to be making a significant contribution to the future of Air Force, especially in navigation warfare.
