Terrain-Relative Navigation with Neuro-Inspired Elevation Encoding

Abstract

Terrain-relative navigation (TRN) encompasses a wide variety of algorithms that perform localization with respect to the terrain below a flying vehicle. In traditional approaches, measurements of the terrain are matched to a map carried onboard. This work presents a terrain-relative navigation filter with a position measurement inspired by neural activity associated with positioning in nature. Here, the filter is shown to produce accurate position measurements that outperform popular optimization and template matching methods given poor prior knowledge of the position. The proposed method is also better-suited to distributed implementation than optimization-based methods.