Using geographic information systems (GIS) for UAV landings and UGV navigation

Unmanned air and ground platforms are not currently designed to process contextual information (e.g., land use, building types and time of day) to assist in landing and navigation. Instead, a human operator often provides manually-gathered and synthesized contextual input through control commands. This paper describes research that explores the integration of geographic information system (GIS) data with sensor data to enable (1) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to locate safe emergency landing locations without operator intervention, and (2) unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) to incorporate contextual GIS information for navigation. Informal evaluation of the system revealed the potential to impact navigation and emergency landings through the additional contextual information provided.