Researchers Develop Method to Detect Location in GPS-Challenged Environments
A group of researchers at the US Army Research Laboratory have developed a novel algorithm that can locate humans and robots in areas where GPS is unavailable. According to researchers Gunjan Verma and Dr. Fikadu Dagefu, the army needs to be able to locate agents operating in physically complex, unknown and infrastructure-poor environments. This capability, according to them, is critical to help find dismounted soldiers and for humans and robotic agents to team together effectively. In most civilian applications, solutions such as GPS work well for this task, and help, for example, navigate to a destination via car.
However, such solutions are not suitable for the military environment, the researchers noted. For example, an adversary may destroy the infrastructure (e.g. satellites) needed for GPS; alternatively, complex environments (e.g. inside a building) are hard for the GPS signal to penetrate. This is because complex and cluttered environments impede the straight-line propagation of wireless signals, according to the researchers. Click Here to Read More.
