Autonomous infrared-based guidance system for approach and landing

摘要

This contribution summarizes DLR's recent development of a considerable robust and reliable method to estimate the relative position of an aircraft with respect to a runway based on camera images only (TV, infrared or even PMMW radar). The special advantage of the proposed method is, that neither a calibrated camera (referring to focus length and mounting angles relative to the aircraft) is required, nor any knowledge of special points of the runway (3-D world coordinates and their 2-D identification within the image) is needed. The only reference to the 3-D world, which has to be known, is the width of the runway stripe. The proposed algorithm computes the relative height of the aircraft above the runway stripe and the lateral deviation from the centre line of the runway as well. Additionally, several image analysis procedures are presented which allow to detect the runway stripe by either grouping the asphalt/grass border lines, or by analyzing the alignment structure of runway lights. The proposed image analysis method fulfills real-time requirements and has been tested with several image sequences acquired with different types of IR-cameras.