Using geographic information systems (GIS) for UAV landings and UGV navigation

Author

Rackliffe, Nathan ; Yanco, Holly A. ; Casper, Jennifer

Author_Institution

MITRE Corp., Bedford, MA, USA

fYear

2011

fDate

11-12 April 2011

Firstpage

145

Lastpage

150

Abstract

Unmanned air and ground platforms are not currently designed to process contextual information (e.g., land use, building types and time of day) to assist in landing and navigation. Instead, a human operator often provides manually-gathered and synthesized contextual input through control commands. This paper describes research that explores the integration of geographic information system (GIS) data with sensor data to enable (1) unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) to locate safe emergency landing locations without operator intervention, and (2) unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) to incorporate contextual GIS information for navigation. Informal evaluation of the system revealed the potential to impact navigation and emergency landings through the additional contextual information provided.

Keywords

aerospace control; air safety; aircraft landing guidance; geographic information systems; remotely operated vehicles; space vehicles; GIS data; UAV landings; UGV navigation; contextual GIS information; contextual information; control commands; emergency landings; geographic information systems; human operator; informal evaluation; manually-gathered contextual input; operator intervention; safe emergency landing locations; sensor data; synthesized contextual input; unmanned aerial vehicles; unmanned air and ground platforms; unmanned ground vehicles; Buildings; Geographic Information Systems; Navigation; Roads; Robot kinematics; Robot sensing systems;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Technologies for Practical Robot Applications (TePRA), 2011 IEEE Conference on

Conference_Location

Woburn, MA

Print_ISBN

978-1-61284-482-4

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/TEPRA.2011.5753497

Filename

5753497