Ohio State Engineers Test Navigation System at Easton

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Researchers from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Geodetic Science at Ohio State prepare to test a personal navigation system Thursday morning at Easton Town Center. From left are Pingbo Tang, a post-doctoral researcher, and doctoral students Boris Skopljak and Wei Wang. (Photo by Al Zanyk)Easton Town Center served as a testing site Thursday morning for an Ohio State College of Engineering research group that is developing a navigation system for use by both astronauts and emergency workers.

Faculty and students, with $1.2 million in support from the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, in partnership with NASA, have created a prototype of a Lunar Astronaut Spatial Orientation and Information System (LASOIS) that will help astronauts overcome disorientation that they can experience due to microgravity and other factors.

Research on personal navigation in the college’s Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Geodetic Science dates back to early 2005; the system tested Thursday built upon pioneering and award-winning discoveries made over the past five years by Professor Dorota A. Grejner-Brzezinska and Charles Toth, a senior research scientist in the Center for Mapping.

The team at Easton today, Assistant Professor Alper Yilmaz, doctoral students Boris Skopljak and Wei Wang, doctoral candidate Shaoujun He and post-doctoral researcher Pingbo Tang, selected the Easton location because they could make use of its indoor and outdoor walking areas 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. The project is led by Professor Rongxing (Ron) Li.

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.

The researchers, who are collaborating with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and University of California, 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.

Read more details about the project. Information about the about the National Space Biomedical Research Institute can be found online.

Category: College