My first job out of college (1976) was working in the military defense industry at General Electric in Utica, NY. I was doing some electronics testing for a down-looking radar system to allow missiles to fly autonomously to a target. Some of that technology was used in the early 90’s in a war we had where some may remember video of a bomb finding a chimney and going down it. A key to that technology was an a priori map of the terrain that allowed the radar to correlate what it was seeing live with what had previously been recorded by some other means. It was called terrain autocorrelation for some obvious reasons.
Well, it’s back and it is now “commercial.” That same concept is now being used to track a road in the snow, to allow vehicles to autonomously move. Only difference is we are talking ground penetrating radar.
Localizing Ground Penetrating Radar (LGPR)
SAVE—Safe Autonomous Vehicles Everywhere
