A New Concept of GPU-Accelerated On-Board Visual System for Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

As technology advances, the level of intellectual ability and autonomy of the electronic-mechanical control system of modern aircrafts and spacecrafts is constantly growing, which helps to reduce the crew load and accident rate. But these helpful controlling systems are not perfect, under some unfavorable circumstances they get stuck or start to function unpredictably when faced with a much more complicated real situation than the developers expected, sometimes even lead to crashes. The concept of visual multichannel processing support of aircraft/spacecraft launch and landing as an additional element of automatic control loop for flight safety and reliability improvement is proposed and its advantages, feasibility and expediency are discussed and evaluated. The visual analyzers are very typical for the overwhelming majority of highly organized organisms (humans, animals, insects) as the most informative source of control of movement parameters, so they potentially can effectively improve the reliability of the entire embedded vehicle controlling system and, at the same time, their principal structure, implementation and further functioning are very similar and universal for real flight operation of different vehicles, which opens up great prospects for their application in engineering based on modern revolutionary achievements in the field of methodology and computational technologies for pattern recognition. In particular, it was shown that the required for real vehicles accuracy and productivity can be reached in case of developing the visual multichannel system, as an additional source of flight state information, on the base of NVIDIA Jetson embedded portable low power consuming Graphics processing unit (GPU)-accelerated massively parallel computational platform, providing CUDA and Artificial Intelligence data processing in real-time mode.