2024-07-12 –, Method (1.5)
The Earth’s crustal magnetic field is a powerful tool for navigation as an alternative to GPS. MagNav.jl is an open-source Julia software package that contains a full suite of tools for aeromagnetic compensation and airborne magnetic anomaly navigation. Alongside baseline algorithms, such as Tolles-Lawson and an extended Kalman filter, this package enables multiple approaches for real-time compensation and navigation. This talk will cover these techniques and advanced use cases for MagNav.jl.
The final talk of the MagNav.jl JuliaCon series will discuss the development and options for real-time compensation and navigation, which is important for real-world implementation. At a high level, MagNav.jl provides tooling to compensate for an aircraft’s magnetic field, removing most of the corruption to enable comparing magnetometer readings with detailed maps of the Earth’s magnetic field. It can then use the resultant signal, alongside other readings, as input to a navigation filter, such as an extended Kalman filter, in order to estimate position. Julia is integral to our research in this field due to its specialties in automatic differentiation, ease of neural network construction, and its performance. This talk will showcase how state-of-the-art (Tolles-Lawson) and machine learning aeromagnetic compensation models can be implemented for real-time compensation, otherwise known as online aeromagnetic compensation. Navigation performance for these approaches will also be compared with the standard (not online) models.
Jonathan Taylor is an Associate Staff at MIT Lincoln Laboratory collaborating with the MIT Julia Lab on Magnetic Navigation as an alternative to GPS. His background is in Machine Learning with a focus on NLP, Signal Processing and Navigation.
Albert R. Gnadt