Precision Four-Dimensional Digital Mapping Teaches Humans and Machines to See In the Dark

摘要

Safe and efficient aircraft navigation in challenging environments such as congested airports and metropolitan areas demands mapping solutions with the highest possible precision. Advances in imaging, onboard sensors, and always-connected aircraft provide the real time accuracy needed to operate in such conditions. This paper presents the results of over seven years of research, development, and commercial production of high precision digital mapping for piloted and autonomous aerospace systems and provides examples of the application of those systems to meet the navigation challenges of today and tomorrow. We review new developments using sub-centimeter survey techniques and proprietary tool chains to integrate data collected from in-flight and space-based sensors. These techniques have achieved sub 1-meter accuracy, producing mapping databases of airports and urban flying areas that are five to ten times more accurate than the aircraft mapping solutions flying today. We also discuss the essential role that temporal (4D) mapping will play as the industry strives to achieve not only greater accuracy, but greater responsiveness to aviation environments in which mapped artifacts and surrounding obstacles shift with time. Representing ground transport vehicles in an airport, or the installation of a new building crane in an urban setting, not only requires dramatically more frequent mapping database updates than the current 28-day cycle, but also near real-time integration of dynamic environmental data. To support the 4D perspective, a cloud-based repository has been prototyped that stores digital maps that are continuously updated with data drawn from a wide universe of sources ranging from Notices to Airmen (NOTAMS) to sensor data “crowd sourced” from vehicles in flight.