Micro air vehicle based navigation aiding in degraded environments

Under scenarios of poor satellite visibility such as urban canyons and dense forest canopies, GNSS may be unavailable to dismounts. Portable dead reckoning approaches such as pedometry or inertial navigation drift without bound, and have no inherent automatic ability to correct the accumulated error in the absence of GNSS. We describe an approach for navigation aiding (i.e. bounding this error) by using one or more MAVs which operate to simultaneously maximize received C/N0 and maintain RF connectivity to the dismount. By tracking their own position via GNSS and extracting an estimate of dismount relative position from RF signals, MAVs are able to provide nearby ground elements with supplemental position estimates which, when combined with inertial dead reckoning information, increase the accuracy of their navigation solution.