During the hackathon the team only did a simulated flight, not a real flight, so take the results on effectiveness with a grain of salt. In any environment with significant seasonal changes, localization based on google maps will be a lot harder.
It's obviously not the same precision as the google map, and it needs update, but it's enough to take in account seasonal change and even brutal events (floods, war, fire, you name it).
So you should be able to find the tile of your region at a date close to today, definitely not 4-6 month.
The future is scary. It is now straightforward and inexpensive for lots of folks to construct jam-resistant Shahed-style drones. https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005006499367697.html
Those things are getting really good. The drift specs keep getting better - a few degrees per hour now. The last time I used that kind of thing it was many degrees per minute.
Linear motion is still a problem, because, if all you have is accelerometers, position and velocity error accumulates rapidly. A drone with a downward looking camera can get a vector from simple optical flow and use that to correct the IMU. Won't work very well over water, though.
An INS will usually need some kind of sensor fusion to become accurate anyways. Like how certain intercontinental ballistic missiles use stars (sometimes only a single one) as reference. But all these things are based on the assumption of clear sight and even this google maps image based navigation will fail if the weather is bad.
Why do you say that? Navigational techniques like this (developed and validated over longer timeframes of course) are precisely for war where you want to cause mayhem for your enemies who want to prevent you from doing that by jamming GPS.
This is not just an idea but we have already fielded systems.
> over the water this wouldn’t be useful
What is typically done with cruise missiles launched from sea that there is a wide sweep of the coast mapped where it is predicted to make landfall. How wide this zone has to be depends on the performance of the innertial guidance and the quality of the fix it is starting out with.
All the navigational methods predating GPS still work perfectly fine so.
Mind you, military hardware is not your smartphone, OTA updates are usually not a thong for various reasons.
The approach for sure is interesting so.
I mean, a prominent tree along a stone wall might be sufficient to be fairly sure, if you at least got some idea of the area you're in via dead reckoning.
As an added data source to improve navigation accuracy, the approach sure is interesting (I am no expert in nav systems, just remotely familiar with some of them). Unless the approach was tried in real world scenarios, and developed to proper standards, we won't see it used in a milotary context so. Or civilian aerospace.
Especially since GPS is dirt cheap and works for most drone applications just fine (GPS, Galileo, Glanos doesn't matter).
I was thinking along the lines of preprocessing satellite images to extract prominent features, then using modern image processing to try to match against the observed features.
A quite underconstrained problem in general, but if you have a decent idea of where you should be due to dead reckoning, then perhaps quite doable?
Here are some papers: https://secwww.jhuapl.edu/techdigest/Content/techdigest/pdf/...
You can use other things like Visual Odometer, but there are better sensors/techniques for that.
What it can do, if you have a big enough database onboard, and descriptors that are trained on the right thing, is give you a location when you hit land.
No, but you can use the stars. Even during the day.