Photo: Honeywell
Present-day humans are so reliant on GPS systems and digital maps to get their bearings that it is almost impossible to imagine a world without them. Yet, humans lived without such things no more than 10, 15 years ago, and one never knows when those times may be back on account of whatever disaster, poor area coverage, or enemy jamming.
As civilians, we are now literally dependent on GPS, but military forces are even more so. This is why, for them, the prospect of having to work without global positioning aids must be even more daunting. And this is also why armed forces are also training to operate without them.
A possible tool to aid them with this might be Honeywell’s recently-announced “lineup of alternative navigation solutions” that need no GPS to work.
This lineup includes several technologies, all meant to provide the troops using them with information about positioning, speed and heading. Honeywell spilled some limited beans on three of them in mid-April.
The first is called Vision-Aided Navigation and relies on a live optical or infra-red camera feed and stored maps. Using the images it gets from the camera and comparing them with the existing maps, the system allows for “GPS-like accuracy in GPS-denied or jammed conditions.”
The fancy-called Celestial-Aided Navigation is next, bringing to the table a system that literally observes the stars and other reference objects, such as satellites with known positions and speeds, and then it is capable of determining the user’s position and speed.
Last but not least comes the Magnetic Anomaly-Aided Navigation, a tool that measures magnetic strength and compares the results with “known geographical magnetic maps.” The results is info about the user’s position.
Honeywell says prototypes of these tools will become available next year, with actual deliveries expected to begin in 2023.
A possible tool to aid them with this might be Honeywell’s recently-announced “lineup of alternative navigation solutions” that need no GPS to work.
This lineup includes several technologies, all meant to provide the troops using them with information about positioning, speed and heading. Honeywell spilled some limited beans on three of them in mid-April.
The first is called Vision-Aided Navigation and relies on a live optical or infra-red camera feed and stored maps. Using the images it gets from the camera and comparing them with the existing maps, the system allows for “GPS-like accuracy in GPS-denied or jammed conditions.”
The fancy-called Celestial-Aided Navigation is next, bringing to the table a system that literally observes the stars and other reference objects, such as satellites with known positions and speeds, and then it is capable of determining the user’s position and speed.
Last but not least comes the Magnetic Anomaly-Aided Navigation, a tool that measures magnetic strength and compares the results with “known geographical magnetic maps.” The results is info about the user’s position.
Honeywell says prototypes of these tools will become available next year, with actual deliveries expected to begin in 2023.
Google News