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Achieving airbreathing hypersonic flight is an ongoing challenge with the potential to cut air travel time and provide cheaper access to space. Waveriders are potential candidates for achieving hypersonic cruise or acceleration flight within the atmosphere. Current research tends to focus on key issues like thermal loading, aero-elasticity and aerothermodynamics at hypersonic speeds. Design problems in each of these areas must be solved if a hypersonic waverider design is to be viable.

This paper presents the development process of an airborne multi-sensor system for autonomous detection and tracking of flying obstacles. The hardware/software prototype integrating Detect, Sense, and Avoid capability, has been designed and realized by the Italian Aerospace Research Center and the Department of Aerospace Engineering of the University of Naples “Federico II”. First of all, system architecture is described. The sensing subsystem is comprised of a Ka-band airborne pulsed radar, a visible panchromatic high-resolution camera, a visible color high-resolution camera, two thermal infrared cameras, and a processing unit for sensor data fusion. Estimated performance of radar/electro-optical sensor fusion is reported. Then the ground segment developed to monitor test flight in real time is described and data from preliminary flight tests are presented and discussed

This paper presents an innovative method for estimating the attitude of airborne electro-optical cameras with respect to the onboard autonomous navigation unit. The procedure is based on the use of attitude measurements under static conditions taken by an inertial unit and carrier-phase differential Global Positioning System to obtain accurate camera position estimates in the aircraft body reference frame, while image analysis allows line-of-sight unit vectors in the camera based reference frame to be computed. The method has been applied to the alignment of the visible and infrared cameras installed onboard the experimental aircraft of the Italian Aerospace Research Center and adopted for in-flight obstacle detection and collision avoidance. Results show an angular uncertainty on the order of 0.1° (rms).

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