Harnessing the magnetic field of the Earth for navigation has shown promise as a viable alternative to other navigation systems. A magnetic navigation system collects magnetic field data using a magnetometer and uses magnetic anomaly maps to estimate location. The greatest challenge with magnetic navigation arises when the magnetic field data from the magnetometer encompass the magnetic field from not just the Earth, but also from the vehicle on which it is mounted. It is difficult to separate the Earth magnetic anomaly field, which is crucial for navigation, from the total magnetic field reading from the magnetometer. The challenge is to remove the aircraft magnetic field from the total magnetic field (i.e. aeromagnetic compensation) in order to derive a clean signal for magnetic navigation. The full challenge description is here: https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2007.12158

The current state of the challenge problem is open. Submissions may be sent at any time to magnav-admins@mit.edu and will be evaluated on a rolling basis.

Introductory Videos and Supporting Software

The YouTube playlist below contains multiple videos that introduce the challenge problem and toolkit.

In addition to these videos, the MagNav.jl Julia software package is publicly available to support development on this challenge problem. A Docker image with an example notebook is available on Docker Hub.

Evaluation Criteria​

Submissions are judged against mag_1_c, the professionally compensated tail stinger scalar measurement, in standard deviation for each flight line in the held out evaluation dataset. Flight lines or portions of flights lines have been held back from all released flights. The submission must contain a script that accepts any of the original HDF5 files as input and produces flight line, time, and compensated data, in tabular format, as output.

Leaderboard

The best submission to date was submitted by: Ling-Wei Kong, Cheng-Zhen Wang, and Ying-Cheng Lai from Arizona State University (submission).