3217 results about "Inertial navigation system" patented technology

Apparatus and methods are disclosed for use within an image-guided surgical navigation system for the storage and measurement of trajectories for surgical instruments. An icon representing the real-time trajectory of a tracked instrument is overlaid on one or more pre-acquired images of the patient. At the surgeon's command, the navigation system can store multiple trajectories of the instrument and create a static icon representing each saved trajectory for display. The surgeon may also measure a planar angle between any two trajectories. The angle is computed in the plane of the image, and therefore will be computed separately for each image displayed. Furthermore, the surgeon has the option of computing and displaying the three-dimensional distance between two points defined by any two trajectories.

A system for use during a medical or surgical procedure on a body. The system generates an image representing the position of one or more body elements during the procedure using scans generated by a scanner prior or during the procedure. The image data set has reference points for each of the body elements, the reference points of a particular body element having a fixed spatial relation to the particular body element. The system includes an apparatus for identifying, during the procedure, the relative position of each of the reference points of each of the body elements to be displayed. The system also includes a processor for modifying the image data set according to the identified relative position of each of the reference points during the procedure, as identified by the identifying apparatus, said processor generating a displaced image data set representing the position of the body elements during the procedure. The system also includes a display utilizing the displaced image data set generated by the processor, illustrating the relative position of the body elements during the procedure. Methods relating to the system are also disclosed. Also disclosed are devices for use with a surgical navigation system having a sensor array which is in communication with the device to identify its position. The device may be a reference frame for attachment of a body part of the patient, such as a cranial reference arc frame for attachment to the head or a spine reference arc frame for attachment to the spine. The device may also be a localization frame for positioning an instrument relative to a body part, such as a localization biopsy guide frame for positioning a biopsy needle, a localization drill guide assembly for positioning a drill bit, a localization drill yoke assembly for positioning a drill, or a ventriculostomy probe for positioning a catheter.

An Ultra-Tightly Coupled GPS-inertial navigation system for use in a moving agile platform includes a range residual extractor that uses best curve fitting of a third order polynomial for estimating range residual. The curve-fitted residual is used to update an error Kalman filter. The error Kalman filter includes correction for navigation solution, and IMU and GPS parameters. The navigation solution together with GPS parameter corrections are used in a Tracking Predictor to generate high-sampling-rate carrier and code replicas. The curve-fitting error covariance indicates signal to noise ratio for the tracked GPS signal and may be used for early indication of interference or jamming.

An improved fully-coupled vehicle positioning process and system thereof can substantially solve the problems encountered in global positioning system-only and inertial navigation system-only, such as loss of global positioning satellite signal, sensibility to jamming and spoofing, and inertial solution's drift over time, in which the velocity and acceleration from an inertial navigation processor are used to aid the code and carrier phase tracking of the global positioning system satellite signals, so as to enhance the performance of the global positioning and inertial integration system, even in heavy jamming and high dynamic environments. The improved fully-coupled GPS / IMU vehicle positioning system includes an IMU (inertial measurement unit) and a GPS processor which are connected to a central navigation processor to produce navigation solution that is output to an I / O (input / output) interface.

The present invention relates to a reduced scale industrial helicopter, with an integrated automatic flight control system, that includes core autopilot functions, GPS management, and full-function navigation systems. The autopilot technology includes rapid launch capability, real-time in-flight switching between one or more of a) remote control, b) autopilot-directed, c) ground station controlled, and d) home modes, and is upgradeable. The helicopter is used for high or low altitude surveillance, and can handle various payloads, including photographic missions. The helicopter may include onboard batteries and / or a unique battery unit disposed beneath the helicopter, and includes autonomous features such as automatic takeoff, automatic landing, safety return to home base, and predetermined mission plans.

The invention provides an indoor positioning method based on an inertial navigation system and WIFI (wireless fidelity), which has high positioning accuracy and can effectively solve the problems that the existing inertial navigation system is not suitable for long-time navigation positioning due to large accumulative error in the positioning process. The method is characterized by comprising the autonomous positioning of the inertial navigation system and the auxiliary positioning of a WIFI wireless network, namely, comprising the following steps of: firstly, initializing a positioning terminal device to obtain a WIFI wireless signal and determine the initial position of the positioning terminal device through the WIFI wireless network, secondly, autonomously positioning the real-time position information of the positioning terminal device by using the inertial navigation system, and simultaneously calibrating the real-time position information through the WIFI wireless network and carrying out on-line adjustment on the step length information in the autonomous positioning of the inertial navigation system; and finally uploading the real-time position information of the positioning terminal device or the real-time position information calibrated by the WIFI wireless network through the WIFI wireless network and displaying the mobile trace of the positioning terminal device in the display system of the positioning terminal device.

Methods and apparatuses for estimating a user's altitude with respect to the mean sea level are provided. According to some aspects, the present invention is able to estimate altitude in both open sky as well as in degraded GPS signal environments such as dense urban canyon environments where GPS performance is affected by fewer available satellites and / or multipath error. According to other aspects, the present invention uses data from a pressure sensor to estimate altitude, either with or without the use of GPS aiding data. According to further aspects, estimated altitude is integrated with other types of dead reckoning data to provide user context detection pertaining to changes of altitude.

The invention relates to a system and method for generating a lane-level navigation map of an unmanned vehicle based on multi-source data. The lane-level navigation map comprises an offline global map part and an online local map part. According to an offline module, within a target region where the unmanned vehicle runs, original road data is acquired through satellite photos (or aerial photos), a vehicle sensor (laser radar and a camera) and a high-precision integrated positioning system (a global positioning system and an inertial navigation system), then the original road data is subjected to offline processing, multiple kinds of road information are extracted, and finally the road information extracting results are fused to generate the offline global map. The offline global map is stored through a layered structure. According to an online module, when the unmanned vehicle automatically drives in the target region, the road data in the offline global map is extracted according to real-time positioning information, and the online local map with the vehicle as the center within the fixed distance range is drawn. The system and method can be applied to fusion sensing, high-precision positioning and intelligent decisions of the unmanned vehicle.

A marine seismic exploration method and system comprised of continuous recording, self-contained ocean bottom pods characterized by low profile casings. An external bumper is provided to promote ocean bottom coupling and prevent fishing net entrapment. Pods are tethered together with flexible, non-rigid, non-conducting cable used to control pod deployment. Pods are deployed and retrieved from a boat deck configured to have a storage system and a handling system to attach pods to cable on-the-fly. The storage system is a juke box configuration of slots wherein individual pods are randomly stored in the slots to permit data extraction, charging, testing and synchronizing without opening the pods. A pod may include an inertial navigation system to determine ocean floor location and a rubidium clock for timing. The system includes mathematical gimballing. The cable may include shear couplings designed to automatically shear apart if a certain level of cable tension is reached.

A fully-coupled vehicle positioning method and system with differential GPS substantially solves problems encountered in either the global positioning system-only or the inertial novigation system-only, such as loss of global positioning satellite signal, sensitivity to jamming and spoofing, and an inertial solution's drift over time, in which the velocity and acceleration from an inertial navigation processor of the integrated GPS / INS system are used to aid the code and carrier phase tracking of the global positioning system satellite signals, so as to enhance the performance of the global positioning and inertial integration system, even in heavy jamming and high dynamic environments. To improve the accuracy of the integrated GPS / INS navigation system, phase measurements are used and the idea of the differential GPS is employed. A master-slave relative positioning scheme is invented and is effective for high accuracy formation driving and flight.

A positioning and navigation method and system thereof can substantially solve the problems encountered in global positioning system-only and inertial navigation system-only, such as loss of global positioning satellite signal sensibility to jamming and spoofing, and inertial solution's drift over time, in which the velocity and acceleration from an inertial navigation processor and an attitude and heading solution from an AHRS processor are used to aid the code and carrier phase tracking of the global positioning system satellite signals, so as to enhance the performance of the global positioning and inertial integration system, even in heavy jamming and high dynamic environments and when the GPS satellite signals are not available.

A new Fault Detection and Exclusion (FDE) approach for tightly integrated GPS / inertial sensors that combines a normalized solution separation for fault detection and a residual monitoring scheme for fault exclusion is described. The computation of the detection threshold, the horizontal protection level and the horizontal uncertainty level are also presented. This new FDE algorithm is designed to enable the tightly integrated GPS / inertial sensor to be used as a primary means of navigation sensor for civil aviation.

A positioning method and system for water and land vehicles is disclosed for highly accurate and self-contained operation. In which, an inertial navigation system (INS) is built on the micro MEMS (MicroElectroMechanicalSystem) IMU that is the core of the position determination system. To compensate the error of the INS, multiple navigation sensors are integrated into the system. The magnetic sensor is used as a magnetic field sensor to measure the heading of the vehicle. The odometer is used to measure the distance when the vehicle is on land. An automated Zero velocity updating method is used to calibrate the ever increasing INS errors. When the vehicle is in the water, a velocimeter is used to measure water speed for the INS aiding.

A system and method synthesizing images of a locale to generate a composite image that provide a panoramic view of the locale. A video camera moves along a street recording images of objects along the street. A GPS receiver and inertial navigation system provide the position of the camera as the images are being recorded. The images are indexed with the position data provided by the GPS receiver and inertial navigation system. The composite image is created on a column-by-column basis by determining which of the acquired images contains the desired pixel column, extracting the pixels associated with the column, and stacking the columns side by side. The composite images are stored in an image database and associated with a street name and number range of the street being depicted in the image. The image database covers a substantial amount of a geographic area allowing a user to visually navigate the area from a user terminal.

The invention discloses a machine vision and inertial navigation fusion-based mobile robot motion attitude estimation method which comprises the following steps of: synchronously acquiring a mobile robot binocular camera image and triaxial inertial navigation data; distilling front / back frame image characteristics and matching estimation motion attitude; computing a pitch angle and a roll angle by inertial navigation; building a kalman filter model to estimate to fuse vision and inertial navigation attitude; adaptively adjusting a filter parameter according to estimation variance; and carrying out accumulated dead reckoning of attitude correction. According to the method, a real-time expanding kalman filter attitude estimation model is provided, the combination of inertial navigation and gravity acceleration direction is taken as supplement, three-direction attitude estimation of a visual speedometer is decoupled, and the accumulated error of the attitude estimation is corrected; and the filter parameter is adjusted by fuzzy logic according to motion state, the self-adaptive filtering estimation is realized, the influence of acceleration noise is reduced, and the positioning precision and robustness of the visual speedometer is effectively improved.

Security systems and methods configured for use with an item of merchandise for retail display include a housing, at least one sensor carried by the housing and at least one output device carried by the housing. The security system further includes a controller carried by the housing and operably coupled to the sensor and to the output device. The controller is operable to determine a distance traveled by the item of merchandise from a retail display “home” position based upon a sensor input from the sensor, and to activate the output device based upon the distance traveled by the item of merchandise exceeding a threshold distance. The controller may utilize the at least one sensor in conjunction with an inertial navigation system (INS) and motion processing algorithms or techniques to determine the distance traveled by the item of merchandise from the retail display “home” position.

A real-time integrated vehicle positioning method and system with differential GPS can substantially solve the problems encountered in either the global positioning system-only or the inertial navigation system-only, such as loss of global positioning satellite signal, sensitivity to jamming and spoofing, and an inertial solution's drift over time. In the present invention, the velocity and acceleration from an inertial navigation processor of the integrated GPS / INS system are used to aid the code and carrier phase tracking of the global positioning system satellite signals, so as to enhance the performance of the global positioning and inertial integration system, even in heavy jamming and high dynamic environments. To improve the accuracy of the integrated GPS / INS navigation system, phase measurements are used and the idea of the differential GPS is employed. However, integer ambiguities have to be resolved for high accuracy positioning. Therefore, in the present invention a new on-the-fly ambiguity resolution technique is disclosed to resolve double difference integer ambiguities. The real-time fully-coupled GPS / IMU vehicle positioning system includes an IMU (inertial measurement unit), a GPS processor, and a data link which are connected to a central navigation processor to produce a navigation solution that is output to an I / O (input / output) interface.

If a route has not yet been set in a car navigation apparatus, and when a vehicle approaches a specific crossing or a charging station located ahead of a current-driving road, or when remaining charge of a battery becomes less, the navigation apparatus retrieves and displays information about charging stations of the respective branching directions. When the vehicle approaches a specific crossing, the navigation apparatus guides information for indicating whether or not a charging station is present, a distance, and whether or not the vehicle can reach the charging station with respect to each of directions branched from the specific crossing. Also, when a charging station is located ahead of the road, the navigation apparatus retrieves charging stations of the respective branching destinations at a specific crossing located in front of the road, and judges whether or not the vehicle can be driven up to the respective retrieved charging stations.

A system and apparatus taught to determine the identification and selected information relating to surgical instruments near a reader. The information can be stored on a member operable to transmit the information to a reader at a selected time. The information can be used in a navigation system to assist in navigation of the instrument relative to a patient.

A method for tracking a moving platform (MP) wherein the MP uses an on-board navigation system (NS). Data provided by the navigation system on board the moving platform (MP) is merged with data obtained using a tracking system that tracks the MP from another location. A typical navigation system on board the moving platforms is an inertial navigation system (INS). State data of one or more MP is sent to a processing facility and state data of one or more electromagnetic tracking (EMT) is collected by one or more processing facility. The collected states data from the sources are processed, using the one or more processing facilities for calculating tracking data are used to direct one or more antennas for MP tracking. The state data from one or more MP's are sent using a communications channel.

An apparatus and method is disclosed for efficiently sensing and tracking objects in an indoor environment by simultaneously measuring the object movement with an inertial navigation system and a reference location positioning system. By combining the measurements obtained with accelerometers, gyroscopes, angle estimators and the reference system using an extended Kalman filter based approach, a position estimate is obtained with high reliability and precision accuracy. Improvement in performance is obtained by the incorporation of dynamic mode switching and forward-backward smoothing in the location position estimator.

The invention relates to a remote high precision autonomous integrated navigation and positioning method, which is characterized in that a Strapdown Inertial Navigation System (SINS) is used as a main navigation system during the whole flight course of the aircraft, assisted by 3D high precision position and attitude angle information provided by celestial navigation system (CNS) based on the least square differential correction in boost phase (or middle segment). In reentry phase (terminal), using the characteristics of synthetic aperture radar (SAR), such as strong penetration capability, high resolving precision and all-weather, the SINS can be corrected through accurate location information and course information provided by SAR scene matching after motion compensation when the aircraft reentry into atmospheres, so the impact point (hit) accuracy of the aircraft can be increased and the invention has remarkable effects of eliminating or decreasing non-guidance error. The invention has advantages of autonomy and high precision, which can be used for improving remote ballistic missile, remote cruise missile, navigation and positioning accuracy of remote aircraft, such as long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicle, etc.

System and method for tracking obstacles by an autonomous vehicle. Localization sensors (i.e., sensors to measure pitch, roll, and yaw, and systems including an inertial navigation system, a compass, a global positioning system, or an odometer) detect the position of the vehicle. Perception sensors (e.g., LIDAR, stereo vision, infrared vision, radar, or sonar) assess the environment about the vehicle. Using these sensors, locations of terrain features relative to the vehicle are computed and kept up-to-date. The vehicle trajectory is adjusted to avoid terrain features that are obstacles in the path of the vehicle.

The scene matching method for raising navigation precision includes the following steps: 1. for the topographic scene matching module in combined navigation system to read in topographic data based on the digital topographic picture; 2. to search mapping point in the topographic picture based on the current geographic location the inertial navigation system obtains; 3. to intercept the reference map data from the topographic picture around the mapping point; 4. matching the measured map and the reference map; and 5. correcting inertial navigation with the matched result so as to raise the precision of inertial navigation system greatly. One simulating combined navigation system is also disclosed, which includes an aviation trace planning module, a flight control module, an aviation trace generator, an inertial navigation module, a topographic scene matching module matching module and an image displaying module. It has high locating precision, high autonomy and excellent man-computer operation interface.