Vision Sensor for Measuring Aerial Refueling Drogue Using Robust Method

In this research, a moving target position measurement system based on vision sensors is developed, which can be used for remote monitoring of UAV refueling docking under complex environment. The developed system uses two vision sensors and embedded devices placed on a fixed point of the UAV to realize a synchronous acquisition of given drogue images, and transmits it to the computer to calculate the drogue position in real time. In this paper, an adaptive processing algorithm for abnormal regions based on stereo vision is proposed, which can determine the illumination inconsistent regions that affect the matching in the image pair according to the statistical distribution. A fast stereo rectification algorithm for image pair is proposed to deal with sensor micro jitter. A multi-cost fusion robust matching algorithm based on “ship” search is also proposed to further improve the position measurement accuracy. The robustness and effectiveness of the measurement system in moving target remote measurements are verified by simulation flight and field flight tests.