Vision-Only Aircraft Flight Control
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Abstract
Building aircraft with navigation and control
systems that can complete flight tasks is complex,
and often involves integrating information from
multiple sensors to estimate the state of the vehicle.
This paper describes a method, in which a glider
can fly from a starting point to a predetermined end
location (target) precisely using vision only. Using
vision to control an aircraft represents a unique
challenge, partially due to the high rate of images
required in order to maintain tracking and to keep
the glider on target in a moving air mass. Second,
absolute distance and angle measurements to the
target are not readily available when the glider does
not have independent measurements of its own
position. The method presented here uses an
integral image representation of the video input for
the analysis. The integral image, which is obtained
by integrating the pixel intensities across the image,
is reduced to a probable target location by
performing a cascade of feature matching functions.
The cascade is designed to eliminate the majority of
the potential targets in a first pruning using
computationally inexpensive process. Then, the
more exact and computationally expensive
processes are used on the few remaining candidates;
thereby, dramatically decreasing the processing
required per image. The navigation algorithms
presented in this paper use a Kalman filter to
estimate attitude and glideslope required based on
measurements of the target in the image. The
effectiveness of the algorithms is demonstrated
through simulation of a small glider instrumented
with only a simulated camera.
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2003-10
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