Undead Reckoning

Faculty Advisors: Penina Axelrad & Dennis Akos 

Industry Mentors: RTX

Summary: Our team, Undead Reckoning, is a group of 49 CU Boulder Aerospace Engineering students designing and demonstrating a fixed-wing, Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) that navigates as accurately as possible when Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) signals are lost. 

Modern UASs rely heavily on GNSS for navigation, but jamming, spoofing, or a system outage can cause the aircraft to land prematurely or crash. To address this, we are applying enhanced dead reckoning methods that fuse data from onboard sensors to estimate position during GNSS outages of up to 900 seconds. 

The UASs onboard sensor suite will primarily include an inertial measurement unit, visual inertial odometry camera, airspeed indicator, and range finder.  Advanced algorithms will interpret and combine this sensor information into useable GNSS-style position coordinates via an onboard companion computer. Our goal is to calibrate the sensors for the first 300 seconds, and then maintain a navigation accuracy within 150 m ground target after 600 seconds of steady, level, unaccelerated flight. 

Our goal is to create a robust, affordable approach to autonomous flight in denied environments while giving students hands-on experience in systems integration, sensor fusion, and flight testing; skills directly applicable to defense, logistics, and remote sensing.