Optical Navigation Sensor for Runway Relative Positioning of Aircraft during Final Approach

Precise navigation is often performed by sensor fusion of different sensors. Among these sensors, optical sensors use image features to obtain the position and attitude of the camera. Runway relative navigation during final approach is a special case where robust and continuous detection of the runway is required. This paper presents a robust threshold marker detection method for monocular cameras and introduces an on-board real-time implementation with flight test results. Results with narrow and wide field-of-view optics are compared. The image processing approach is also evaluated on image data captured by a different on-board system. The pure optical approach of this paper increases sensor redundancy because it does not require input from an inertial sensor as most of the robust runway detectors.