Lunar Autonomous Automatic Surface Navigation System, Phase I

To address the NASA GRC Laboratory need for navigation capabilities to provide location awareness, precision position fixing, best heading, and traverse path planning for planetary EVA, manned rovers, and lunar surface mobility units, Physical Optics Corporation (POC) proposes to develop a new Lunar completely Autonomous Automatic Surface Navigation (LAAN) system. This system will incorporate a POC-developed highly-efficient miniature self-mixing interferometric speedometer sensor, POC's proprietary tunable liquid crystal lens autofocusing system, and a robust prediction tracking algorithm that will enable us to meet NASA lunar mission requirements. The LAAN system will offer position accuracy better than 2.5 m with 95% probability per 0.5 hr of motion without interaction with other positioning systems, and be compact (less than 10 cubic in.), lightweight (less than 8 oz), and consume less than 0.5 W. In Phase I, POC will demonstrate the feasibility of LAAN by creating and testing a preliminary prototype, which will demonstrate TRL-4 by the end of Phase I. In Phase II, POC plans to develop a fully functional prototype and demonstrate its complete feasibility (TRL-6). The results will offer NASA capabilities to provide better navigation for lunar mobile units during creation of scientific, industrial, and transport facilities, space monitoring stations, etc.

This is a mature technology (TRL 7+) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

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