Estimation of Visual Shoreline Navigation Errors

Abstract

In some cases, navigation of aircraft or spacecraft may need to be conducted in a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS)-denied environment. So, additional sources of navigation information may need to be used to increase navigation precision and resilience. Such sources can include visual navigation systems such as visual shoreline navigation. The main feature of visual shoreline navigation is the severe variability of navigation errors depending on the shape of the observed shoreline, the distance and the view angle of the observation. Such variations are so great that it is not possible to use average values of errors. So, each measurement of an aircraft or spacecraft position should be accompanied with an estimation of the error covariance matrix in real time. It is proposed to use the Cramer-Rao lower bound of visual shoreline navigation errors as such a matrix. The method for constructing the Cramer-Rao lower bound is described in this paper.