Navigation System Provides Direction -- Even Without GPS

Engineering faculty and students, with $1.2 million in support from the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, in partnership with NASA, are developing a personal navigation system for use by both astronauts and emergency workers.

“Although LASOIS was initiated for manned missions to the moon, now that NASA’s focus has shifted, this technology could be used in future missions to asteroids or Mars,” says Alper Yilmaz, assistant professor, who is conducting the work with Rongxing (Ron) Li, professor, and doctoral students and researchers, all in civil and environmental engineering and geodetic science.The research team has created a prototype of a Lunar Astronaut Spatial Orientation and Information System (LASOIS) that will help astronauts overcome disorientation they can experience due to microgravity and other factors.

The researchers, who are collaborating with MIT and UC-Berkeley, use imaging, mapping and sensor technology as well as psychological and cognitive research on spatial orientation and navigation for their system. The technology consists of multiple integrated sensors including an Inertial Measurement Unit mounted on a boot, stereo video cameras mounted on a chest bar and a step pressure sensor mounted in a boot sole. The researcher wearing the navigation equipment can monitor the information he receives from the sensors via a device mounted on his forearm using an OLED, or organic light emitting diode, display unit developed by Honeywell Inc.

This year, the team tested the prototype at Easton Town Center, a Columbus-area shopping mall.

“We want to show how the system can also be used on Earth as a successful replacement for GPS, particularly for emergency workers in disaster situations such as fires, earthquakes and mine disasters when GPS signal is not available,” Yilmaz says.

In March 2011, the team plans to conduct field experiemnts in Hawaii on volcanic terrain, which has conditions that would be similar to the surface of another planet in space.

Research on personal navigation in the college’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Geodetic Science dates back to early 2005 and includes pioneering and award-winning discoveries by Professor Dorota A. Grejner-Brzezinska and Charles Toth, a senior research scientist in the Center for Mapping.

Grejner-Brzezinska and Toth, in work sponsored by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, use a combination of global positioning systems with inertial navigation systems, barometers and digital compasses, called magnetometers, as well as image-based navigation for indoor environments. The main novelty, however, is the use of artificial intelligence techniques to design and implement a Knowledge Based System, a term they use to describe their technology that models human dynamics (step length and step direction), training the system to learn how the user moves in real time, to predict and support navigation when other sensors fail.

Their personal navigation system is being further developed as a military hand-held device by a small California business that specializes in military solutions for land-based and underwater navigation. The company’s work is supported by the U.S. Department of Defense. Grejner-Brzezinska and Toth continue to provide their expertise to the company.

Contact:

Alper Yilmaz, (614) 247-4323, yilmaz.15@osu.edu

On the Web: The Ohio State LASOIS project, shoreline.eng.ohio-state.edu/research/nsbri_08/overview.html