ELECTROOPTICAL NAVIGATION FOR AIRCRAFT

Low altitude flight is extremely demanding on the rotorcraft pilots. T his fact has motivated the research in automating various components o f low altitude rotorcraft flight operations. Concurrent with the devel opment of guidance laws, efforts are underway to develop systems for l ocating the terrain and the obstacles using inputs from passive electr o-optical sensors such as TV cameras and infrared imagers. A passive o bstacle location algorithm that uses image sequences from cameras unde rgoing translational and rotational motion is developed. The algorithm is in a general form and can operate in multicamera imaging environme nts. Performance results using an image sequence from an airborne came ra are given.