Image-Based Drift and Height Estimation for Helicopter Landing in Brownout

Kurzfassung

After years of experiences regarding enhanced and synthetic vision research projects in the fixed wing domain, the DLR’s Institute of Flight Guidance is now addressing helicopter applications, as well. The project ALLFlight is one example. The main objective of this project is to demonstrate and evaluate the characteristics of different sensors for helicopter operations within degraded visual environments, such as brownout or whiteout. Radar, Lidar, IR and TV cameras are part of this sensor-suite. Although this project aims for the “large solution” of the brownout problem, there are also simple “small solutions” investigated, which can be installed in low cost helicopters as well. The following paper is dealing with such an approach. We assume a pair of off-the shelf vertical looking cameras and an intertial attitude system, which are feeding their data into a low budget processing system. The outcome consists of the helicopter’s lateral drift and its altitude above the ground. These data can be shown easily to the pilot on a cheap display. The paper describes the proposed setup and methods for drift and height measuring.