AUTOMATED LANDING OF AN UNMANNED HELICOPTER TO AN UNEQUPPED SITE

Abstract

Unmanned helicopters perform many tasks in difficult operating conditions and are subject to various destabilizing factors that significantly affect flight safety. The main problems encoun-tered in the operation of unmanned helicopters are considered. It is shown that the insufficient level of flight safety is caused, in particular, by the high frequency of crashes during forced land-ings. The necessity of creating onboard means of automatic landing of an unmanned helicopter is proved. Taking into account the requirements of the Federal aviation regulations for landing plac-es, the parameters-restrictions that allow formalizing the choice of terrain areas suitable for land-ing according to the onboard technical vision system are formulated. On the basis of comparative analysis, it is shown that at present, when forming the initial video data for solving this problem, it is advisable to use a complex system of technical vision based on mutually adjusted and having a common viewing area of a 3D laser sensor, color video camera and thermal imager. The proposedrecognition algorithms of the pick-up location in the video data on-Board complex system of tech-nical vision with the use of geometric criteria and the reference permeability. It is proposed to perform the recognition of landing places based on the criterion of geometric cross-country capa-bility in two stages: at the first stage, a map of terrain heights is formed based on 3D laser sensor data, and at the second stage, areas suitable for helicopter landing are selected. Recognition of suitable and unsuitable areas is performed by comparing the elevation differences of this terrain with the reference elevation differences defined for this unmanned helicopter. It is proposed to perform the recognition of suitable landing sites based on the criterion of reference passability by calculating the Euclidean distance between the obtained data and pre-known standards corre-sponding to different types of soil in the six-dimensional feature space (height variance, reflected signal intensity, three colors, and temperature). The final selection of suitable places for planting is proposed to be made from sites that meet both criteria. The results of the work of the corre-sponding software and hardware in real conditions are presented, confirming the correctness and effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.