Technique locates robots, soldiers in GPS-challenged areas

According to ARL researchers Gunjan Verma and Dr.

Fikadu Dagefu, the Army needs to be able to localize agents operating in physically complex, unknown and infrastructure-poor environments.

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"This capability is critical to help find dismounted Soldiers and for humans and robotic agents to team together effectively," Verma said. "In most civilian applications, solutions such as GPS work well for this task, and help us, for example, navigate to a destination via our car."

However, noted the researchers, such solutions are not suitable for the military environment.

"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," Dagefu said. "This is because complex and cluttered environments impede the straight-line propagation of wireless signals."

Dagefu said that obstacles inside the building, especially when their size is much larger than the wavelength of the wireless signal, weaken the power of the signal (attenuation) and re-direct its flow (called multipath), making a wireless signal very unreliable for communicating information about location.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2018-10-technique-robots-soldiers-gps-challenged-areas.html#jCp