Terrain navigation using the correlator method

In many vehicle applications such as, unmanned air vehicles (UAV), autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV), and submarine applications, there is a need to robustly and accurately determine the vehicle´s position relative to a map in an effective way in terms of both cost and energy consumption. Such situations may occur in reconnaissance operations. This paper discusses terrain navigation using the correlation method, used in a recursive manner, for determining the vehicle position. The position is determined by sampling the terrain topography with a multibeam radar or sonar and then match the measured topography with a map. Using several measuring beams leads to a linear Kalman filter problem with nearly optimal performance. The proposed method is very accurate, robust, and computationally efficient compared to other methods used for terrain navigation.