Wang Xufeng
Air Force Engineering University School of Aeronautics and Astronautics Engineering, China
Title: Real-time Drogue Measurement for Autonomous Aerial Refueling Based on Computer Vision
Biography
Biography: Wang Xufeng
Abstract
Autonomous aerial refueling (AAR) has been playing an increasingly important role in improving the capacity of the aircraft. During the docking phase of the probe-drogue AAR, one of the key problems is the drogue measurement which includes drogue detection and recognition, drogue spatial locating and drogue attitude estimation. To solve this problem, a novel and effective method based on computer vision is presented. For the drogue detection and recognition, considering the safety and robustness to the drogue diversity in the changing environmental conditions, the high reflection red-ring-shape feature instead of a set of infrared light emitting diodes (LEDs) is set on the parachute part of the drogue to achieve optimal performance, by using computer vision with prior domain knowledge incorporated. For the drogue spatial locating and drogue attitude estimation, in order to ensure the accuracy and real-time performance of the entire system, a monocular vision method is designed based on the camera calibration model with camera lens distortion considered, in view of its simple structure and high operation speed. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method and a practical implementation that considers the effect of airflow has been provided. The results of the drogue measurement are analyzed, together with a comparison between the proposed method and the competing methods. The results show that the proposed method can realize drogue measurement efficiently and satisfy the requirement of AAR.