Section: Contracts and Grants with Industry
Terrain–aided navigation — contract with Thalès Communications
Participants : François Le Gland, Nordine El Baraka.
INRIA contract ALLOC 2857 — September 2007 to August 2010.
This collaboration with Thalès Communications is supported by DGA (Délégation Générale à l'Armement) and is related with the supervision of the CIFRE thesis of Nordine El Baraka.
The overall objective is to study innovative algorithms for terrain–aided navigation, and to demonstrate these algorithms on four different situations involving different platforms, inertial navigation units, sensors and georeferenced databases. The thesis also considers the special use of image sensors (optical, infra–red, radar, sonar, etc.) for navigation tasks, based on correlation between the observed image sequence and a reference image available on–board in the database.
Marginalized particle filters [70] and regularized particle filters [10] have been implemented, and several propositions have been studied to adapt the sample size, such as KLD–sampling [44] , which could be useful in the case of a poor initial information, or if the platform flies over a poorly informative area. Besides particle methods, which are proposed as the basic navigation algorithm, simpler algorithms such as the extended Kalman filter (EKF) or the unscented Kalman filter (UKF) have also been investigated.
