Testing and Evaluation of a Vision-Augmented Navigation System for Automatic Landings of General Aviation Aircraft

Abstract

Landing is a critical phase of flight, where an accurate knowledge of the aircraft's position relative to the destination runway is required. During flights conducted under Visual Flight Rules, the flight crew maintains continuous visual contact with the runway to conduct a safe landing. When visibility is degraded and external visual cues are not available, the flight is conducted under Instrument Flight Rules, and the flight crew is reliant on the radio navigation Instrument Landing System to guide the aircraft to the runway. However, such systems require expensive on-board and ground-based infrastructure, which is usually not available at smaller airfields typically used for general aviation. In order to fill this gap, the objective of the C2Land project is to develop an on-board navigation system independent of ground-based infrastructure to enable automatic landings for general aviation aircraft. The navigation system is augmented with visible-light and infrared cameras, which detect the runway in Visual Meteorological Conditions as well as Instrument Meteorological Conditions. After testing the navigation system in a Hardware-in-the-Loop environment, it is integrated in the DA42-based research aircraft OE-FSD. Flight tests are conducted and the performance of the navigation solution is compared to a commercial-off-the-shelf inertial navigation system. Finally, the usability of the new navigation system is demonstrated by automatic landings of the research aircraft.