Mitigating the effects of boom occlusion on automated aerial refueling through shadow volumes

Paulson, Zachary

doi:10.1177/1548512918808408

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…32 The engine has been used successfully for testing stereo computer vision techniques in simulation for automated aerial refueling applications 33 and for testing structure from motion. [34][35][36]…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Virtual testbed for monocular visual navigation of small unmanned aircraft systems

Kim

Leishman

Nykl

2020

Journal of Defense Modeling & Simulation

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Monocular visual navigation methods have seen significant advances in the last decade, recently producing several real-time solutions for autonomously navigating small unmanned aircraft systems without relying on the Global Positioning System (GPS). This is critical for military operations that may involve environments where GPS signals are degraded or denied. However, testing and comparing visual navigation algorithms remains a challenge since visual data is expensive to gather. Conducting flight tests in a virtual environment is an attractive solution prior to committing to outdoor testing. This work presents a virtual testbed for conducting simulated flight tests over real-world terrain and analyzing the real-time performance of visual navigation algorithms at 31 Hz. This tool was created to ultimately find a visual odometry algorithm appropriate for further GPS-denied navigation research on fixed-wing aircraft, even though all of the algorithms were designed for other modalities. This testbed was used to evaluate three current state-of-the-art, open-source monocular visual odometry algorithms on a fixed-wing platform: Direct Sparse Odometry, Semi-Direct Visual Odometry, and ORB-SLAM2 (with loop closures disabled).

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Virtual testbed for monocular visual navigation of small unmanned aircraft systems

Kim

Leishman

Nykl

2020

Journal of Defense Modeling & Simulation

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The virtual environment was built using the AftrBurner engine, a cross-platform visualization engine 32 . The engine has been used successfully for testing stereo computer vision techniques in simulation for automated aerial refueling applications 33 and for testing structure from motion [34][35][36] .…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Virtual Testbed for Monocular Visual Navigation of Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems

Kim,

Leishman,

Nykl

2020

Preprint

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Monocular visual navigation methods have seen significant advances in the last decade, recently producing several real-time solutions for autonomously navigating small unmanned aircraft systems without relying on GPS. This is critical for military operations which may involve environments where GPS signals are degraded or denied. However, testing and comparing visual navigation algorithms remains a challenge since visual data is expensive to gather. Conducting flight tests in a virtual environment is an attractive solution prior to committing to outdoor testing. This work presents a virtual testbed for conducting simulated flight tests over real-world terrain and analyzing the real-time performance of visual navigation algorithms at 31 Hz. This tool was created to ultimately find a visual odometry algorithm appropriate for further GPS-denied navigation research on fixed-wing aircraft, even though all of the algorithms were designed for other modalities. This testbed was used to evaluate three current state-of-the-art, open-source monocular visual odometry algorithms on a fixed-wing platform: Direct Sparse Odometry, Semi-Direct Visual Odometry, and ORB-SLAM2 (with loop closures disabled).

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“…Sun et al [5] developed a bionic visual close-range navigation control system for AAR. And Paulson et al [6] presented a novel algorithm for mitigating the negative effects of boom occlusion in stereo-based aerial environments. Zhu et al [7] and Johnson et al [8] attempted to combine different sensors system for AAR, such as the inertial navigation system (INS), GPS, stereo vision system and infrared search and track system (IRST).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Novel Method for Measuring Drogue-UAV Relative Pose in Autonomous Aerial Refueling Based on Monocular Vision

Zhao

Liu

et al. 2019

IEEE Access

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The key to the docking phase of autonomous aerial refueling missions is the relative pose measurement between the drogue and unmanned aerial vehicles. A novel measurement method for drogue-UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) relative poses based on monocular vision is proposed in this paper. An adaptive arc-level structural feature extraction algorithm is applied to obtain the features that can be used for the measurements. In this algorithm, the projection of the end plane of the drogue in the image plane is accurately extracted based on an extraction quality metric. The projection contour and centroid of the internal black part of the drogue form the structural feature for the measurements. A robust pose estimation algorithm is presented to estimate the relative pose between the drogue and the UAV. The pose can be solved using a cone that is composed of the optical center of the camera and the structural feature. A Kalman filter is then applied to robustly estimate the pose of the drogue. A simulation and ground experiment are used to verify the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed method, which achieves good performance compared with other methods.

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Mitigating the effects of boom occlusion on automated aerial refueling through shadow volumes

Cited by 6 publications

References 22 publications

Virtual testbed for monocular visual navigation of small unmanned aircraft systems

Virtual testbed for monocular visual navigation of small unmanned aircraft systems

Virtual Testbed for Monocular Visual Navigation of Small Unmanned Aircraft Systems

A Novel Method for Measuring Drogue-UAV Relative Pose in Autonomous Aerial Refueling Based on Monocular Vision

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