Battlefield Navigation with MEMS

The availability of low-cost GPS jamming and spoofing technologies renders GPS-only solutions for location and navigation an increasingly dangerous choice for the dismounted soldier in a battlefield environment. Therefore, it is essential that a self-contained, non-infrastructure-based location technology be developed to maintain the optimal war fighting capability of the modern US dismounted soldier. However, inertial solutions are very difficult to implement properly even without the unique challenges particularly presented by human motion dynamics. For example, on a battlefield, soldiers tend to dodge, dive, duck, and run, thus creating motion measurement challenges that would cause tracking errors even in existing vehicular inertial navigation units, which are generally too large, heavy and consume too much power for a soldier-based application.