An Optical Navigation System for Autonomous Aerospace Systems

An innovative electro-optical navigation system called Optical Navigation System (OptoNav) for Autonomous Landing consisting of a machine vision camera, and a set of co-registered structured light beacons is proposed. OptoNav is used to directly sense the altitude and two orientation states of an air vehicle with respect to the flight path direction. Motivated by autonomous landing applications involving fixed-wing aircraft, the machine vision camera is used to process the images of the runway so as to establish a moving coordinate system affixed to the runway, making use of the perspective geometry of the camera system. Three or more structured light emitters are used to make direct measurements of the range using the geometry of the perspective projection model by making use of the co-registration of the camera with respect to the structured light emitting sources. A unique formulation of the minimal relative motion states is used to directly estimate the three states of altitude, pitch and roll angle of the airframe with respect to the moving coordinates affixed to the runway. Laboratory experiments are used to validate the utility of the OptoNav sensor system.