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Celestial Navigation for Drones

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Re: Celestial Navigation for Drones

#81
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are perfect markers only as long as you can see them. Clouds and fog are your enemies here

That. However that works just fine for ICBMs and the like… The future is more likely to be quantum accelerometers and quantum gyroscopes, as they have no “external dependency”.

More likely image-based navigation, where you just upload the entire imagery of the route and then use it to correct your inertial references.

Encrypted positioning information from low-orbit satellites is another option.

Re: Celestial Navigation for Drones

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember watching a video about a dude who was building a mothership-launched glide drone that could land using camera vision. The idea was something like "the highest egg drop" or something like that. He was speaking with academics about his idea, who quickly told him to stop whatever he was doing because that would effectively be a forbidden military device. Guided artillery, basically. Sadly I don't remember who…

Happened to codyslab, videos taken down now (but still on archive.org) of a uranium purification process and possibly nilered,no way to prove it but he had a 'making rocket fuels: part 1' that was never followed p on. Not totally sure though as people like BPS space on yt have some pretty in depth tutorials on solid rocket motors (does explicitly censor how to make the ignition component)

Uhm, there are plenty of videos about making solid rocket fuel. Model rocketry doesn't need any special permits until you get to launching large rockets.

Re: Celestial Navigation for Drones

#83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or in short, the sensors are strapped down to the platform being measured - like your phone’s sensors for example.

Yes! It's in contrast to gimbaled systems. Putting the measuring instrument on a gimbal simplifies the math and often improves accuracy, but at the expense that you need this large moving object that needs more power.

Except that a gimbaled system, if enclosed in a single box/pod, can also be described as a strapdown system. The term speaks more to separate modularity than how the system functions internally.

Re: Celestial Navigation for Drones

#84

Ctrl+F and 0 results for munitions or bombs. Seems like this is really about $25 controller gets drones to within 4km in GPS denied enviroments, after which a $50 infrared camera + DSMAC find targets to hit.

Ukrainian and Russian drones already do that. They use simple visual navigation for terminal guidance: https://www.rockingrobots.com/ukraine-drones-able-to-navigat...

At this point, it's pretty clear that this type of functionality is out of the bag. Any significant actor can easily replicate this with minimal effort, given the advances in AI.

Re: Celestial Navigation for Drones

#85
post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BICEP3 actually uses a >20 year old CCD camera with analog video output (BICEP Array uses newer cameras, with more modern sensors). Daytime star pointings are possible by using a low-pass filter to block visible light and take advantage of the sensitivity of CCD / CMOS sensors to the near infrared, where the daytime sky is more transparent, combined with baffling.

how hard would this be to set up for a total hardware noob? and how good or useful would the data be? i know gaia data for instance is available for free but if one used just a homemade telescope could any useful celestial data be acquired?

With images taken at night, you can run the images through Astrometry.net, which is a blind astrometric solver and will provide you with RA / Dec for most images, as long as you have at least a dozen or two stars visible. The code compares asterisms formed by multiple stars to index files built from Gaia or other similar data. This is the technique that's used more frequently for microwave telescopes located where there's a normal diurnal cycle, e.g., CLASS. The smaller the field of the view, the higher the precision, but it also works fine with a camera with a zoom lens.

BICEP, however, is located at the South Pole on a moving ice sheet, requiring frequent updates to its pointing model, and has six months of continuous daylight, so daytime star pointing observations are required. This requires a different technique. Instead of looking at asterisms with multiple stars, the optical pointing telescope is pointed at a single star using an initial pointing model, the telescope pointing is adjusted until the star is centered, and the offset is recorded. This measurement process is repeated for the few dozen brightest stars, which acquires the data needed for refining the pointing model.

Re: Celestial Navigation for Drones

#86

Fun fact: The SR-71 and U2 planes had automated celestial navigation systems b/c GPS wasn't around when they came out. There a story in the book about Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works where they mention turning on the system while one of the planes was in the hangar and it locked on to a hole in the roof (sun was shining through the hole and system thought it was a start).

I recently watched this channels videos on B-52 Astro tracking navigation system repairs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkvN74wuT8w&list=PL-_93BVApb...

He's got a bunch of other vintage electronics stuff that's from the early space program as well, interesting stuff to see the insides of that gear.

Re: Celestial Navigation for Drones

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And, it's a bit older than that: the SR-71's derived from ICBM targeting systems, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_guidance#Astro-inertia... ( "the latter of which was adapted for the SR-71..." ) (Actually the very first one, in that history, was an intercontinental cruise missile —a jet weapon that slightly predated (~1958) rockets powerful enough to cross oceans. ICBM's came a bit later. I'm pretty sure the fi…

Reminds me of the "the distance between the rails of a railway are due to the width of Roman horse drawn carts" story.

I've actually used this fact in a related way, for wayfinding.

Old school Open-CV was able to see tracks well from an onboard monocular camera, but calibration and scale was annoying. Track width is accurate enough that I was able to use it to input a bunch of head-end video to map the tracks.

It was mostly just a modified edge detect where the tracks approximately would be. Once finding the tracks, you could automatically calculate the camera's height, lateral location, and angle.

Re: Celestial Navigation for Drones

#89
post #5

Perhaps I am too paranoid, but I've been told to avoid doing any DIY in this field of study. Apparently, or so I'm told, out of the many, many ways to end up on a list — building a working celestial navigation system can lead to some very inconvenient outcomes. Second, only to ordering large quantities of certain chemicals online. Is this true? ——— EDIT - from the paper, this is incorrect, > The introduction of GPS c…

Not NSA - you'd have someone from US Bureau of Industry and Security tracking you down (no pun) for most likely violating export controls if you were to openly share information on building the technology.

Celestial tracking is a dual use technology (See 7A004 or 7A104) - https://www.bis.doc.gov/index.php/documents/regulations-docs...

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