An approach to autonomous navigation using matching of geophysical features

Section 1 of the full paper discusses the feasibility of the autonomous navigation using matching of geophysical features. Section 2 explains the principles of the autonomous navigation using matching of geophysical features; eq. (4) is proposed by us; its core consists of: (1) each feature of geomagnetic field and the gravity gradient in the flight path of a flight vehicle are measured synchronously; (2) each measurement sequence is constructed and matched against the corresponding reference map; (3) the matching results of all features are fused and then the location information is obtained. Section 3 explains the design of the genetic algorithm we use; its core is that the genetic algorithm based on the real acceleration value code is designed as the search algorithm of the matching algorithm; the matching algorithm applies the mean square difference (MSD) algorithm as the similarity criterion for each feature and uses the weighted maximum value principle to fuse the similarity values of all features. The simulation results, presented in Figs. 2, 3 and 4, show preliminarily that the positioning error obtained with this approach is small; hence it can be applied as an approach to the autonomous navigation of the low-altitude and low-speed vehicles.