A Bionic Polarization Compass And Its Navigation Application

In the natural world, the animals have evolved various sophisticated autonomous navigation positioning mechanisms to adapt to complex environment, and these localization mechanisms provide good references for developing novel navigation methods. Through studying and imitating biological localization mechanisms to develop new bionic navigation sensors will certainly promote the development of bionic navigation and positioning technology.This paper carries out research on polarization navigation sensor development and navigation application on the basis of biological polarized skylight navigation mechanism.The specific contents of this thesis is as follows:1) Investigates and summarizes the research status of polarization navigation technology and the biological polarization navigation mechanism of desert ant, locust and so on. According to the biological polarization navigation mechanism and the features of existing domestic and foreign polarization sensors, a bionic polarization navigation sensor is developed. To improve the measurement accuracy of developed sensor, a standard polarized light source system is set up to calibration the sensor and the calibration data is fitted by quadratic polynomial based on least square method, thus compensating the system error.2) In order to find the output characteristic of the developed sensor, the heading output of a high precision navigation system is used to fit the output polarization angle of developed sensor, and thus a heading acquisition method is proposed for the developed polarization sensor.3) Analyzing the external environment factors that affect the navigation stability of the developed orientation sensor, and an integrated navigation method based on data fusion of developed polarization orientation sensor and low-cost inertial navigation sensor is proposed to complement each other’s advantages, thus explore a new polarization navigation method.The measurement accuracy and operation frequency of developed polarization sensor are respectively0.3degree and10Hz. Compared to traditional point-source and image-based polarization sensor, the developed polarization has the advantages of good timeliness and high robustness. In order to evaluate the navigation performance of the developed polarization sensor and effectiveness of proposed integrated navigation method, dead reckoning experiments with the sensor, inertial navigation sensor and GPS are performed. Within a driving distance of2.0kilometers, the max and mean position errors of the integrated navigation system are both lower than polarization sensor or inertial navigation sensor. Therefore, the experiments results verify the effectiveness of developed orientation sensor and proposed integrated navigation method, and further more promote the study of bionic navigation technology.