Fusion for Degraded Visual Environment Pilotage

摘要

Arete Associates, in partnership with the Army's Night Vision and Electronic Sensors Directorate (NVESD), have demonstrated in flight a fused LIDAR/LWIR/EO system that provides a pilotage aid for rotorcraft operations in degraded visual environments (DVE). Arete's purpose-built DVE lidar provides full-waveform processing to enable novel dust suppression and weak-target detection techniques. This lidar system is integrated with wide field of view, high resolution, LWIR and EO cameras to provide full situational awareness with fast update rates. The sensor fusion system creates a high-fidelity 3D world model in real time including ground surface, terrain features, hazards, and obscurant distributions. This model is used to construct an informative and intuitive cockpit display in real time. This system also incorporates offline terrain and image data bases to augment the live sensor data in areas beyond the sensor fields of view. This system will be tested in flight in DVE in 2016.