Recent proliferation of small Unmanned Aerial Systems (sUAS) applications requires onboard collision avoidance systems to mitigate the risk of collision with non-cooperative aircraft and manned aircraft, which may not see sUAS in time to perform an avoidance maneuver. An attractive avenue for onboard collision avoidance is the utilization of machine vision cameras due to their low size, weight and power (SWaP) requirements. In this paper, we characterize the range performance of a machine vision system developed in-house and mounted onto an sUAS. The technique was designed to estimate the performance of a sense-and-avoid system to ensure that the sensing components meet the well-clear requirements for the chosen platform and avoidance strategy. Experimental flight-test data was acquired from test-flights flown along multiple collision geometries for two intruders: a general Aviation (GA) aircraft and a fixed-wing sUAS. The ownship and both intruders were instrumented with inertial navigation systems (INS) recording position and attitude information. The range at first detection, 𝑹𝟎, was extracted from in-flight imagery of head-on collision course geometry synchronized with INS data from both aircraft and ground-truth values extracted from the raw imagery. This initial detection distance, 𝑹𝟎, scales with atmospheric attenuation. Therefore, under clear sky conditions, the derived 𝑹𝟎 value represents the upper bound on the detection range achievable by the test configuration of the detector. Results indicate that the maximum initial detection distance for a 4k resolution action camera fitted with a 41º Field of View (FOV) lens is 2.763 ± 0.037 km for a GA aircraft and 0.881 ± 0.061 km for a fixed-wing sUAS, respectively. The in results this study suggest that a vision-based detect and track system may be analyzed using the sensor characterization and contextualized within aircraft well-clear volumes.


    Access

    Access via TIB

    Check availability in my library


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    Monocular Ranging for Small Unmanned Aerial Systems in the Far-Field


    Contributors:

    Conference:

    AIAA SciTech Forum ; 2021 ; Online, US


    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    No indication


    Language :

    English




    Monocular Ranging for Small Unmanned Aerial Systems in the Far-Field

    Dolph, Chester / Minwalla, Cyrus / Glaab, Louis J. et al. | AIAA | 2021


    MONOCULAR RANGING FOR SMALL UNMANNED AERIAL SYSTEMS IN THE FAR-FIELD

    Dolph, Chester / Minwalla, Cyrus / Glaab, Louis J. et al. | TIBKAT | 2021



    Delayed monocular SLAM approach applied to unmanned aerial vehicles

    Munguía Alcalá, Rodrigo Francisco / Urzua, Sarquis / Grau Saldes, Antoni | BASE | 2016

    Free access

    Aerial survey laser ranging device mounted on unmanned aerial vehicle

    HUANG HUAJUAN / LAN MIAN / WEI DONGMING et al. | European Patent Office | 2023

    Free access