Infrared camera array system for air robot autolanding without GPS

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel infrared camera array guidance system with capability to track and provide real time position and speed of an air robot during a landing process. The system mainly include three novel parts: Infrared camera array and infrared laser lamp based cooperative long range optical imaging module; Large scale outdoor camera array calibration module; and Laser marker segmentation and 3D tracking module. Extensive automatic landing experiments with fixed-wing flight demonstrate that our infrared camera array system has the unique ability to guide the air robot landing safely and accurately in real time, and the landing point error is less than 0.2 meters. Moreover, the measurement and control distance of our system is over 1000 meters, far beyond many state-of-the-art optical guidance systems. The experimental results also demonstrate that our system can be used for air robot automatic accuracy landing in GPS-denied environments.