Patent — available for licensing
Vision-based Approach and Landing System (VALS)
A NASA invention available to explore as a licensing opportunity.
About this technology
Overview
There are certain situations when landing an Advanced Air Mobility (AAM) aircraft is required to be performed without assistance from GPS data. For example, AAM aircraft flying in an urban environment with tall buildings and narrow canyons may affect the ability of the AAM aircraft to effectively use GPS to access a landing area. Incorporating a vision-based navigation method, NASA Ames has developed a novel Alternative Position, Navigation, and Timing (APNT) solution for AAM aircraft in environments where GPS is not available. The technology employs an aircraft-mounted camera to visually detect known features in the landing area, using a computer vision method called Coplanar Pose from Orthography and Scaling with Iterations (COPOSIT) to determine the position and orientation of the aircraft relative to the features detected from the camera images, and an extended Kalman filter to predict and correct the estimated position, velocity, and orientation of the aircraft.