Navigation using linear photo detector arrays

The growth of light emitting diodes (LED´s) for illumination enables new approaches both for communication and navigation. One of the challenges when LED´s are used in the navigation systems is how to extract and capitalize effectively on the encoded LED ID. A single photo detector (PD) provides the simplest hardware approach and could communicate with LED´s at a very high data rate, but only offers the most basic level of positioning. Cameras provides much more informative position measurements; however, there are challenges to achieving high rate LED-to-camera data communications due to the current hardware architectures of cameras. Alternatively, linear PD arrays allow high sample rates, high accuracy and low cost. This article investigates the issues (observability, extrinsic parameter calibration, and vehicle state initialization) related to implementation of a positioning and communications system built on a linear optical sensor array.