Abstract
In 2020, over 10,000 bird strikes were reported in the USA, with average repair costs exceeding $200 million annually, rising to $1.2 billion worldwide. These collisions of avifauna with airplanes pose a significant threat to human safety and wildlife. This article presents a system dedicated to monitoring the space over an airport and is used to localize and identify moving objects. The solution is a stereovision based real-time bird protection system, which uses IoT and distributed computing concepts together with advanced HMI to provide the setup’s flexibility and usability. To create a high degree of customization, a modified stereovision system with freely oriented optical axes is proposed. To provide a market tailored solution affordable for small and medium size airports, a user-driven design methodology is used. The mathematical model is implemented and optimized in MATLAB. The implemented system prototype is verified in a real environment. The quantitative validation of the system performance is carried out using fixed-wing drones with GPS recorders. The results obtained prove the system’s high efficiency for detection and size classification in real-time, as well as a high degree of localization certainty.
Highlights
The first collision of a bird with an aircraft, so-called bird strike, was reported in1905, and in 1912 the first fatality was noted [1]
The reports show that the average bird strike rate, which is counted per 10,000 flights, increased from 11 in the year 2011 to 33 in the year 2017 [4]
According to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), most of the bird strikes occur during the approach, 33%, take off, 31%, and landing, 26%, which means that 90% of incidents occur in the airspace under the airport’s legal responsibility [4]
Summary
The first collision of a bird with an aircraft, so-called bird strike, was reported in. The administration and legal regulations introduced by the ICAO and European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) oblige each airport to minimize the bird and wildlife strike risk, under Wildlife and Hazard Management (WHM) [5,6]. Different techniques and methods allowing the mitigation of bird strike risk such as the ornithological observations and radar based solutions [7] are the most widespread at medium and large airports. To meet the requirements of a market tailored product, which may be customized to any small and medium size airport, a stereovision based real-time solution embedded into the Internet of Things (IoT) and a distributed computing paradigm is proposed. The real-time field verification at an airport runway using drones with a GPS recorders shows the system’s capacity to detect moving objects at a range of 300 m and to localize them within the required accuracy of 10%. It is proven that the proposed solution is able to classify detected objects into one of three size categories corresponding to bird size
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