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Future sensing technologies are needed to provide higher accuracy, lower power consumption and occupy small real estate within munitions. The novel ideas being supported at the Army Research Development Engineering Center (ARDEC) at Dover, New Jersey, uses principles of electromagnetic propagation and the properties of waveguide cavities with various geometries to develop a new class of sensors for onboard direct measurement of the angular orientation and position of objects in flight and applications such as mobile robotic platforms. Currently available sensors for munitions are based on inertia, optics or heat. Inertia based sensing generally suffers from drift, noise and the currently available sensors cannot survive high firing accelerations while maintaining the required measurement sensitivity. Optical technologies generally have short range and require line-of-site. The sensing technologies presented in this paper employ radio frequency, make direct measurement of position and orientation, and do not require added information for their operation. The presented sensors employ waveguide cavities that are embedded into the structure of munitions. It is shown that the geometry of the waveguide cavity can be designed to achieve high angular orientation sensitivity with respect to a reference, polarized electromagnetic field. In this paper, the theoretical fundamentals describing the operation of the developed sensors are described. Studies of the interaction of the polarized signals with various waveguides and cavity geometries are presented. Simulations results as well as experimental results validating the theoretical and the simulation results are provided. The simulation and experimental results clearly demonstrate the potentials of the developed position and angular orientation sensors in general, and to munitions in particular.
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