Pure geomagnetic homing navigation on earth surface

摘要

For human beings, geomagnetism has already been applied in navigation and heading systems, but up to now it is either an assistant to other navigation methods or it requires large amount of pre-stored magnetic data. Pure geomagnetic navigation is investigated in this paper where geomagnetism is the only information to be relied on. Two geomagnetic field elements are utilized in homing navigation on earth surface. The homing mechanism iteratively search the optimal homing direction for minimal travel distance, which is based on linearization approximations of the fields' distribution in a small local area. This algorithm is tested in two simulations with world magnetic model, results show that the destinations are reached effectively, which has implied potential for experiment realization in the future.