Enhanced Situational Awareness for Automatic Aerial Refueling

On June 27th at 12:00, Room B-221.

Aerial Refueling is a highly strenuous manned mission, where at least two aircrafts (one tanker and one or more receivers) are involved in a complicated maneuver in close proximity. Enhancing the situational awareness is crucial for pilots to ensure the completion of the procedure with safety. A proof of concept of a possible augmented reality solution has been developed. This solution displays additional data to the pilot throughout an aerial refueling maneuver in a simulated virtual environment. The presented data is the relative position between both aircrafts and the location of the incoming aircraft. This information is also relevant to achieve Automatic Aerial Refueling, which is useful to reduce the maneuver risk and is crucial to increase the autonomous aircraft endurance. A review of the state of the art methods involving those computations is also presented, where stereo vision methods show accurate results for the estimation of the relative position in close proximity and deep learning techniques using CNNs seem to be the suitable solution for medium and far distance ranges and for the aircraft detection task.

Carmen Doblado received the Bachelor of Engineering in Telecommunication (major in Sound and Image) in 2013 from the Universidad de Extremadura and the Master in Biomedical Engineering in 2015 from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. She has been a member of the Grupo de Tratamiento de Imágenes (GTI) since 2017 researching on computational imaging.   

Tweet