Navigation is an invisible utility that is often taken for granted with considerable societal and economic impacts. Not only is navigation essential to our modern life, but the more it advances, the more possibilities are created. Navigation is at the heart of three emerging fields: autonomous vehicles, location-based services, and intelligent transportation systems. Global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) are insufficient for reliable anytime, anywhere navigation, particularly indoors, in deep urban canyons, and in environments under malicious attacks (e.g., jamming and spoofing). The conventional approach to overcome the limitations of GNSS-based navigation is to couple GNSS receivers with dead reckoning sensors. A new paradigm, termed opportunistic navigation (OpNav), is emerging. OpNav is analogous to how living creatures naturally navigate: by learning their environment. OpNav aims to exploit the plenitude of ambient radio frequency signals of opportunity (SOPs) in the environment. OpNav radio receivers, which may be handheld or vehicle-mounted, continuously search for opportune signals from which to draw position and timing information, employing on-the-fly signal characterization as necessary. In collaborative opportunistic navigation (COpNav), multiple receivers share information to construct and continuously refine a global signal landscape. For the sake of motivation, consider the following problem. A number of receivers with no a priori knowledge about their own states are dropped in an environment comprising multiple unknown terrestrial SOPs. The receivers draw pseudorange observations from the SOPs. The receivers' objective is to build a high-fidelity signal landscape map of the environment within which they localize themselves in space and time. We then ask: (i) Under what conditions is the environment fully observable? (ii) In cases where the environment is not fully observable, what are the observable states? (iii) How would receiver-controlled maneuvers affect observability? (iv) What is the degree of observability of the various states in the environment? (v) What motion planning strategy should the receivers employ for optimal information gathering? (vi) How effective are receding horizon strategies over greedy for receiver trajectory optimization, and what are their limitations? (vii) What level of collaboration between the receivers achieves a minimal price of anarchy? This dissertation addresses these fundamental questions and validates the theoretical conclusions numerically and experimentally. / text
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UTEXAS/oai:repositories.lib.utexas.edu:2152/25076 |
| Date | 09 July 2014 |
| Creators | Kassas, Zaher |
| Source Sets | University of Texas |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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