Unit dual quaternion-based pose optimisation for visual runway observations

Galen Brambley; Jonghyuk Kim

Unit dual quaternion-based pose optimisation for visual runway observations

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Author(s): Galen Brambley¹ and Jonghyuk Kim²
- Affiliations: 1: The Australian National University , Canberra , Australia ;
  2: Centre for Autonomous Systems, University of Technology Sydney , Sydney , Australia
Source: Volume 2, Issue 4, December 2020, p. 181 – 189
DOI: 10.1049/iet-csr.2020.0029 , Online ISSN 2631-6315

This is an open access article published by the IET and Zhejiang University Press under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/)

Received 10/06/2020, Accepted 23/09/2020, Revised 18/09/2020, Published 01/10/2020

This study addresses the pose estimation problem of an aircraft runway using visual observations in a landing approach scenario. The authors utilised the fact that the geodetic coordinates of most runways are known precisely with highly visible markers. Thus, the runway observations can increase the level of situational awareness during the landing approach, providing additional redundancy of navigation and less reliance on global positioning system. A novel pose optimisation algorithm is proposed utilising unit dual quaternion for the runway corner observations obtained from a monocular camera. The estimated runway pose is further fused with an inertial navigation system in an extended Kalman filter. An open-source flight simulator is used to collect and process the visual and flight dataset during the landing approach, demonstrating reliable runway pose estimates and the improved inertial navigation solution.

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Unit dual quaternion-based pose optimisation for visual runway observations

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