Perception Testing in Fog for Autonomous Flight

Abstract

As the path towards Urban Air Mobility (UAM) continues to take shape, there are outstanding technical challenges to achieving safe and effective air transportation operations under this new paradigm. To inform and guide technology development for UAM, NASA is investigating the current state-of-the-art in key technology areas including traffic management, detect-and-avoid, and autonomy. In support of this effort, a new perception testbed was developed at NASA Ames Research Center to collect data from an array of sensing systems representative of those that could be found on a future UAM vehicle. This testbed, featuring a Light-Detection-and-Ranging (LIDAR) instrument, a long-wave infrared sensor, and a visible spectrum camera was deployed for a multiday test campaign in the Fog Chamber at Sandia National Laboratories (SNL), in Albuquerque, New Mexico. During the test campaign, fog conditions were created for tests with targets including a human, a resolution chart, and a small unmanned aerial vehicle (sUAV). This paper describes in detail, the developed perception testbed, the experimental setup in the fog chamber, the resulting data, and presents an initial result from analysis of the data with the evaluation of methods to increase contrast through filtering techniques.

Authors

• George E. Gorospe Jr. Ames Research Center
• Elihu Deneke Sandia National Laboratories
• Brian J. Redman Sandia National Laboratories
• Christiann A. Pattyn Sandia National Laboratories
• Brian Z. Bentz Sandia National Laboratories
• John D. van der Laan Sandia National Laboratories
• Jeremy B. Wright Sandia National Laboratories
• Daniel R. Hart Glenn Research Center
• Nicholas Cramer Ames Research Center
• Corey Ippolito Ames Research Center
• Kelley Hashemi Ames Research Center

Keywords

• advanced air mobility
• Perception
• Fog
• Degraded Visual Environment