Mission Completion – Image Fusion UAS Navigation

Abstract

An unmanned aerial system (UAS) mission of interest is to have multiple UASs coordinate the delivery of payloads. In this operation, one UAS flies over the area of interest and uses imagery to identify pinpoint areas where payload delivery should be made by other UASs. The mission operation uses imagery to pass along the location to the payload delivery UASs. Each payload UAS arrives to the area of interest using standard navigation techniques. The pinpoint navigation employs imagery navigation.In this effort, the imagery navigation approach uses an image-correlation-based technique. The image correlator is invariant to a translation variation. The images must be mapped into a scale or rotational invariant representation. The image correlator will then provide a correlation peak based upon the representation of the navigation image. Once the target location is identified on the invariant image, the correlation peak can then be mapped back to the standard image coordinate system. To demonstrate the capabilities of the proposed image-navigation approach, the results of a two-drone experiment is presented. The technique tracks the delivery sites in the field of view while the drone maneuvers around. The resulting data shows the navigation tracking to identify that the system can control the navigation system.