An aerocraft photogrammetry position sensing system

Abstract

Landing aerial crafts, such as helicopters, on the board of naval vessels of small or medium size is a difficult and risky task for pilots since the tonnages are not large enough which makes the ships always swinging along with ocean waves. Thus the landing areas are moving all the way with six degrees of freedom randomly. Even, this mission will become dangerous and deadly when the weather is stormy. Here, we design a real-time and automatic position sensing system to track, locate and help a helicopter to land on deck safely under all weather conditions. For the sake of practical application, we have not only adopted some ready and mature computational technologies from image processing, photogrammetry and computer vision, but also chosen some simple but effective optical elements to reduce the computational complexity. The system is composed of camera units, image-processing unit, controlling system and fiber optical communication unit. Experimental results show our system is capable of all-weather, real-time, robust and automatic landing mission.