ALLFlight - A Synthetic Vision Sensor Suite with 'See-Through' Capability for Helicopter Applications

Degraded visual environments, such as brownout or whiteout, are addressed within the project ALLFlight (Assisted Low Level Flight and Landing on Unprepared Landing Sites) to demonstrate and evaluate the characteristics of different sensors for helicopter operations. Different sensor systems are mounted onto DLR's research helicopter EC135 and this sensor suite consists of standard color or black and white TV cameras, a millimeter wave radar system (AI-130, ICx Radar Systems, Canada), an un-cooled thermal infrared camera (EVS-1000, Max-Viz, USA), and an optical radar scanner (HELLAS-W, EADS, Germany). A high performance sensor co-computer (SCC) cluster architecture is responsible for data processing, which is installed into the helicopter's experimental electronic cargo bay. Applied methods and the software architecture in terms of real time data acquisition, recording, time stamping and sensor data fusion will be described in this paper. A first approach for a pilot HMI is presented as well.