Airborne Magnetic Anomaly Navigation with Neural-Network-Augmented Online Calibration

TL;DR

This paper introduces an adaptive airborne magnetic anomaly navigation system that calibrates in-flight using neural networks and Kalman filtering, eliminating the need for prior calibration and improving robustness and accuracy.

Contribution

It presents a fully adaptive MagNav architecture with in-flight calibration using a neural network and extended Kalman filter, enabling cold-start operation without offline calibration.

Findings

Achieves navigation accuracy comparable to offline-trained models.

Effectively bounds inertial drift with magnetometer-only data.

Operates without prior calibration flights or maneuvers.

Abstract

Airborne Magnetic Anomaly Navigation (MagNav) provides a jamming-resistant and robust alternative to satellite navigation but requires the real-time compensation of the aircraft platform's large and dynamic magnetic interference. State-of-the-art solutions often rely on extensive offline calibration flights or pre-training, creating a logistical barrier to operational deployment. We present a fully adaptive MagNav architecture featuring a "cold-start" capability that identifies and compensates for the aircraft's magnetic signature entirely in-flight. The proposed method utilizes an extended Kalman filter with an augmented state vector that simultaneously estimates the aircraft's kinematic states as well as the coefficients of the physics-based Tolles-Lawson calibration model and the parameters of a Neural Network to model aircraft interferences. The Kalman filter update is mathematically equivalent to an online Natural Gradient descent, integrating superior convergence and data efficiency of state-of-the-art second-order optimization directly into the navigation filter. To enhance operational robustness, the neural network is constrained to a residual learning role, modeling only the nonlinearities uncorrected by the explainable physics-based calibration baseline. Validated on the MagNav Challenge dataset, our framework effectively bounds inertial drift using a magnetometer-only feature set. The results demonstrate navigation accuracy comparable to state-of-the-art models trained offline, without requiring prior calibration flights or dedicated maneuvers.