Next-generation of sUAS 360 surround vision cameras designed for automated navigation in low-light conditions

Abstract

The next generation of sUAS (small Unmanned Aircraft Systems) for automated navigation will have to perform in challenging conditions, bad weather, high and low temperature and from dusk-to-dawn. The paper presents experimental results from a new wide-angle vision camera module specially optimized for low-light. We present the optical characteristics of this system as well as experimental results obtained for different sense and avoid functionalities. We also show preliminary results using our camera module images on neural networks for different scene understanding tasks.