Information-Aware Guidance for Magnetic Anomaly based Navigation

In the absence of an absolute positioning system,
such as GPS, autonomous vehicles are subject to accumulation of positional error which can interfere with reliable
performance. Improved navigational accuracy without GPS
enables vehicles to achieve a higher degree of autonomy and
reliability, both in terms of decision-making and safety. This
paper details the use of two navigation systems for autonomous
agents using magnetic field anomalies to localize themselves
within a map; both techniques use the information contained in
the environment in distinct ways and are aimed at reducing
the localization uncertainty. The first method is based on
a nonlinear observability metric of the vehicle model, while
the second is an information theory-based technique which
minimizes the expected entropy of the system. These conditions
are used to design guidance laws that minimize the localization
uncertainty and are verified both in simulation and hardware
experiments are presented for the observability approach.