The U.S. Army Research Laboratory awarded the University of Central Florida (UCF) $4.5 million in grant funding to develop a computer vision-based navigation system for use when GPS is unavailable or jammed. The system will act as a cyber copilot that supports navigation of ground vehicles through the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning to assess computer imaging of terrain captured by the vehicle and by UAVs.

“For the Army, this is all about navigating in GPS-denied environments wherein adversaries can jam or spoof GPS signals, and it’s also about supporting ground vehicles with off-board sensors on UAVs that can provide additional perspectives for awareness and threat detection in complex, typically urban, scenarios,” said Kyle Renshaw, principal investigator and an assistant professor in UCF’s College of Optics and Photonics.

The system will use geospatial databases to identify landmarks for correlation to imagery and will track object movements through video to estimate motion.

Although positioning by triangulation and relative motion are not new concepts, the researchers are combining them using artificial intelligence to do this precisely and autonomously, Renshaw said.

The UCF team will partner with researchers from the University of Arizona and the University of Memphis.

Project funding is for four years, with two years awarded immediately and a two-year option for the Army Research Lab to continue funding the work.