Vision-based Autonomous Approach and Landing for an Aircraft using a Direct Visual Tracking Method

This paper presents a feasibility study of a vision-based autonomous approach and landing for an aircraft using a direct visual tracking method. Auto-landing systems based on the Instrument Landing System (ILS) have already proven their importance through decades but general aviation stills without cost-effective solutions for such conditions. However, vision-based systems have shown to have the adequate characteristics for the positioning relatively to the landing runway. In the present paper, rather than points, lines or other features susceptible of extraction and matching errors, dense information is tracked in the sequence of captured images using an Efficient Second-Order Minimization (ESM) method. Robust under arbitrary illumination changes and with real-time capability, the proposed visual tracker suits all conditions to use images from standard CCD/CMOS to Infrared (IR) and radar imagery sensors. An optimal control design is then proposed using the homography matrix as visual information in two distinct approaches: reconstructing the position and attitude (pose) of the aircraft from the visual signals and applying the visual signals directly into the control loop. To demonstrate the proposed concept, simulation results under realistic atmospheric disturbances are presented.