Aerial Refueling (AAR) of Unammed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is vital to the United States Air Force's (USAF) continued air superiority. Inspired by the stereo vision system organic to the new KC46A Pegasus tanker, we present a novel solution for computing a real time relative navigation (rel-nav) vector between a refueling UAV and a KC-46. Our approach relies on a real time 3D virtual simulation environment that models a realistic refueling scenario. Within this virtual scenario, a stereo camera system mounted beneath the KC-46 consumes synthetic imagery of a receiver conducting an aerial refueling approach. This synthetic imagery is processed by computer vision algorithms that calculate the sensed rel-nav position and orientation. The sensed solution is compared against the virtual environment's truth data to quantify error and evaluate the stereo vision performance in a deterministic, real time manner. Our approach yields sub-meter precision at approximately 30 Hz.
展开▼
