Engineering Commons^™

Improving Real-World Performance Of Vision Aided Navigation In A Flight Environment, Donald T. Venable

Theses and Dissertations

The motivation of this research is to fuse information from an airborne imaging sensor with information extracted from satellite imagery in order to provide accurate position when GPS is unavailable for an extended duration. A corpus of existing geo-referenced satellite imagery is used to create a key point database. A novel algorithm for recovering coarse pose using by comparing key points extracted from the airborne imagery to the reference database is developed. This coarse position is used to bootstrap a local-area geo-registration algorithm, which provides GPS-level position estimates. This research derives optimizations for existing local-area methods for operation in flight …

Evaluating Storm Sewer Pipe Condition Using Autonomous Drone Technology, Maria T. Meeks

Theses and Dissertations

The United States Air Force (USAF) owns a total of 30.9 million linear feet (LF) of storm sewer pipes valued at approximately $2.3B in its vast portfolio of built infrastructure. Current inventory records reveal that 78% of the inventory (24.1 million LF) is over 50 years old and will soon exceed its estimated service life. Additionally, the USAF depends on contract support while its business processes undervalue in-service evaluations from long-term funding plans. Ultimately, this disconnect negatively impacts infrastructure performance and overall strategic success, and the USAF risks making uninformed decisions in a fiscally constrained environment.

This research presents a …

Towards Automated Aerial Refueling: Real Time Position Estimation With Stereo Vision, Bradley D. Denby

Theses and Dissertations

Aerial refueling is essential to the United States Air Force (USAF) core mission of rapid global mobility. However, in-flight refueling is not available to remotely piloted aircraft (RPA) or unmanned aerial systems (UAS). As reliance on drones for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and other USAF core missions grows, the ability to automate aerial refueling for such systems becomes increasingly critical. New refueling platforms include sensors that could be used to estimate the relative position of an approaching aircraft. Relative position estimation is a key component to solving the automated aerial refueling (AAR) problem. Analysis of data from a one-seventh …