Tucker Haydon of Sandia National Laboratories

Abstract – The digital age has ushered in a new era of remote navigation systems. What was once a dream --- autonomous cars, air taxis, automated airliner takeoff & landing systems, unmanned spacecraft landing systems, and reusable rocket boosters, to name a few --- are quickly nearing realization. With these technologies comes a need for accurate, robust, and trusted navigation systems that must operate in environments where Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals may be obstructed, degraded, unavailable, or simply insufficient alone to meet system requirements. In such cases, alternative navigation systems may be required to either support or supplant traditional GNSS navigation systems. Terrain-correlating radar navigation systems are one potential solution. Radar navigation pre-dates GNSS and the technology was one of the first to enable unambiguous global navigation. Terrain-correlating radar navigation systems, however, have not kept up with recent developments in radar technology --- namely, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) and interferometry --- which have the potential to greatly improve the accuracy of radar navigation systems. This seminar will introduce the basic concepts of radar-based terrain-aided navigation, identify existing technology gaps, and present recent and upcoming research results related to the use of synthetic aperture radar for terrain-aided navigation.

Biography:

Tucker Haydon is a senior member of the technical staff at Sandia National Laboratories. At Sandia, he analyzes, designs, and implements GPS & inertial navigation systems for prototype systems. Tucker is also a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin where his research is focused on radar-based terrain-aided navigation. Specifically, leveraging Sandia’s 50-years’ experience with radar, Tucker has been developing a terrain-aided navigation technique that leverages a vertical synthetic aperture radar (SAR) to deliver improved navigation performance.