John Raquet gave presentation on Navigation Using Variations in the Earth’s Magnetic Field
Abstract
The Earth’s magnetic field has been used for centuries for the purpose of finding north. This talk describes a completely different approach at using the earth’s magnetic field to navigate, which involves determining absolute position by comparing measured magnetic field variations with a pre-stored map. This talk will describe magnetic field navigation approach in indoor and outdoor (ground) environments, but the primary focus will be on recent work on magnetic field navigation in airborne environment. This talk will describe the components of the earth’s magnetic field and the approaches used to isolate the “useful” components. Results will be presented from a flight test which demonstrated 10m level accuracy positioning of an aircraft using just an INS, barometric altimeter, and magnetometer under ideal conditions. Results will also be shown for a cross-country flight using an existing national magnetic field map, demonstrating that the poor map quality resulted in significant degradations in accuracy when compared to the ideal case using a high quality map.
Speaker’s Bio
John Raquet is the Director of the Autonomy and Navigation Technology (ANT) Center at the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT), where he is also a Professor of Electrical Engineering. Dr Raquet has a PhD in Geomatics Engineering from the University of Calgary, an MS in Aero/Astro Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and a BS in Astronautical Engineering from the US Air Force Academy. The ANT Center is a multiple-department research center involving 25 faculty, 40-50 students, and 12 staff members who are all working in areas of autonomy and navigation. Dr. Raquet has published over 150 navigation-related conference and journal papers and taught 50 navigation-related short courses to over 2600 students in many different organizations. In 2010, Dr. Raquet was a Fulbright Scholar in Finland. He is currently the Executive Vice President of the Institute of Navigation and is an ION Fellow.