AI-powered autonomous navigation for unmanned systems gets exploratory contract from USAF
NewsDecember 16, 2020
COLUMBUS, Ohio. Real-time location system (RTLS) provider Ubihere reports that it won a $150,000 contract from the U.S. Air Force (USAF) to develop artificial intelligence (AI)-powered autonomous navigation for unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) and electric vertical takeoff and landing (EVTOL) vehicles.
The UAS will integrate Ubihere’s next-generation positioning system, which works independently of global positioning system (GPS) to identify the UAS’s location and movement.
Ubihere officials state that the aim of this project with the USAF is to build a demo system that will fly, land, and hover autonomously independent of GPS tracking; the UAS's position data will then be compared and correlated with that of GPS. The UAS team at The Ohio State University’s College of Engineering will support Ubihere as it tests the drone, which be based on the company's proprietary multisensor hardware tracking tags and AI software to focus on a given object’s movement and position in real time and much more accurately than legacy real-time location systems.
Ubihere has commercialized a real-time adaptive, easily trainable, AI video processing technology, based on patents exclusively licensed from Ohio State, technology that was invented and developed by Dr. Alper Yilmaz, Professor of GeoInformatics in Ohio State's civil engineering department, and his research team. Ubihere's "Ubivision" product is a small low-cost self-contained camera and video-processing hardware system powered by proprietary cognitive AI software to process and present actionable analytics from any video stream.
“It is very exciting to take on this challenge and deploy the technology in partnership with the Air Force and Ubihere,” says Dr. Yilmaz. “We will be seeing more commercial and military UAS traffic over the next 10 years, thus it is imperative that these systems can self locate when GPS is not available or is degraded.”
