Vision System Measuring the Position of an Aircraft in Relation to the Runway during Landing Approach.

This paper presents a vision system that measures the position of an aircraft relative to the runway (RWY) during a landing approach. It was assumed that all the information necessary for a correct approach was based entirely on an analysis of the image of the runway and its surroundings. It was assumed that the way the algorithm works, as well as possible, should imitate the pilot's perception of the runway. Taking into account the above and the fact that the infrastructure at each airport is different, it has been decided to use artificial neural networks with a dedicated learning process for any airport, based on the simulation environments. Such an action will enable the generation of a synthetic video sequence without the need for costly and time-consuming flights. The presented solution was tested in real flight conditions on an experimental aircraft, and the selected test results are presented in this article.

In-Flight Tests of Intruder Detection Vision System.

In the near future, the integration of manned and unmanned aerial vehicles into the common airspace will proceed. The changes taking place mean that the safety of light aircraft, ultralight aircraft and unmanned air vehicles (UAV) will become an increasing problem. The IDAAS project (Intruder Detection And collision Avoidance System) meets the new challenges as it aims to produce technically advanced detection and collision avoidance systems for light and unmanned aerial vehicles. The work discusses selected elements of research and practical tests of the intruder detection vision system, which is part the of IDAAS project. At the outset, the current formal requirements related to the necessity of installing anticollision systems on aircraft are presented. The concept of the IDAAS system and the structure of algorithms related to image processing are also discussed. The main part of the work presents the methodology developed for the needs of dedicated flight tests, its implementation and the results obtained. The initial tests of the IDAAS system carried out on an ultralight aircraft generally indicate the possibility of the effective detection of intruders in the airspace with the use of vision methods, although they also indicated the existence of conditions in which this detection may prove difficult or even impossible.

The Application of Flexible Areas of Interest to Pilot Mobile Eye Tracking.

Recent progress in the development of mobile Eye Tracking (ET) systems shows that there is a demand for modern flexible solutions that would allow for dynamic tracking of objects in the video stream. The paper describes a newly developed tool for work with ET glasses, and its advantages are outlined with the example of a pilot study. A flight task is performed on the FNTP II MCC simulator, and the pilots are equipped with the Mobile Tobii Glasses. The proposed Smart Trainer tool performs dynamic object tracking in a registered video stream, allowing for an interactive definition of Area of Interest (AOI) with blurred contours for the individual cockpit instruments and for the construction of corresponding histograms of pilot attention. The studies are carried out on a group of experienced pilots with a professional pilot CPL(A) license with instrumental flight (Instrument Rating (IR)) certification and a group of pilots without instrumental training. The experimental section shows the differences in the perception of the flight process between two distinct groups of pilots with varying levels in flight training for the ATPL(A) line pilot license. The proposed Smart Trainer tool might be exploited in order to assess and improve the process of training operators of advanced systems with human machine interfaces.