Mitigating the Effects of Boom Occlusion on Automated Aerial Refueling Through Shadow Volumes

Abstract

In flight refueling of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is critical to the United States Air Force. However, the large communication latency between an operator and his/her remote UAV makes aerial refueling unsafe. This latency may be overcome by a tanker-based vision system that observes and computes an approaching receivers relative pose. Unfortunately, the boom an arm responsible for physically pumping fuel into the receiver occludes large portions of the receiver. The vision system must be able to compensate for the booms occlusion of the receiver. Our algorithm dynamically compensates for occluded receiver geometry by transforming the occluded areas into shadow volumes. These shadow volumes are then used to cull hidden geometry that is traditionally consumed, in error, by the vision processing pipeline.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
Mar 23, 2018
Accession Number
AD1056201

Entities

People

  • Zachary C Paulson

Organizations

  • Air Force Institute of Technology

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms
  • Autonomy

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Accuracy
  • Air Force
  • Aircrafts
  • Algorithms
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Computational Science
  • Computer Graphics
  • Computer Stereo Vision
  • Computer Vision
  • Flight Paths
  • Geometry
  • Global Positioning Systems
  • Image Processing
  • Light Sources
  • Military Aircraft
  • Navigation
  • Point Clouds
  • Refueling
  • Refueling In Flight
  • Reliability
  • Simulations
  • Tanker Aircraft
  • Three Dimensional
  • Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Readers

  • Aerospace Engineering
  • Robotics and Automation.
  • Systems Analysis and Design

Technology Areas

  • Autonomy
  • Autonomy - UAVs