ML Based Solution for DSMAC System in Aerial Navigation

Reviewed by: The Man Who Discovered Flight: George Cayley and the First Airplane Tanya Gogan (bio) Richard Dee. The Man Who Discovered Flight: George Cayley and the First Airplane. McClelland and Stewart. xii, 328. $32.99 For English aristocrat Sir George Cayley (1773–1857), ‘A day passed without acquiring a new idea, was a day wasted.’ According to biographer Richard Dee, Cayley not only voiced these words, he lived them. Cayley spent most of his life seeking knowledge, promoting education, and encouraging the practical application of science. In particular, he keenly desired to solve the riddle of heavier-than-air flight. Dee’s fascinating biography offers new insights into Cayley’s achievements and will appeal to readers interested in all aspects of the history of science, since Cayley exemplified the unfailing optimism and varied interests held by amateur scientists during these years. Dee combined his family’s interest in aviation, a background in science, and historical research to recapture the importance of Cayley’s work. Living in York, England, as a child, not far from Cayley’s home, Dee acquired a love for aviation from his father, who served in the Royal Air Force. Now residing in Toronto, Dee works as a post-doctoral fellow at York University, where he uses research in neuroscience to help future astronauts cope with extended space flight. While still focusing on the future, Dee [End Page 258] began studying aviation’s past. After examining Cayley’s notebooks, publications, and family correspondence, Dee argues that Cayley discovered the secret of ‘aerial navigation’ and even launched the first airplane long before the American Wright Brothers’ groundbreaking flight. Cayley’s numerous sketches, calculations, aerodynamic tests, and glider flights, all proved that heavier-than-air flight was possible. Sadly, Cayley also realized that engineering was not sufficiently advanced to make powered flight a reality. Nevertheless, Cayley’s work would influence future generations when they began their own experiments many years later. Using chronological chapters to narrate Cayley’s personal and public life, Dee passes quickly over Cayley’s childhood to focus on his years as a baronet from age eighteen until his death at age eighty-four. By the time Cayley reached adulthood he had acquired an unconventional education due to its inclusion of theoretical and practical science. He then married Sarah Walker, the daughter of his first tutor, with whom he fathered ten children. Unfortunately, Cayley’s only surviving son, Digby, did not share his father’s interest in science and felt ashamed by his father’s work in aviation, a subject that many people regarded as mere fantasy. Although a brief political career temporarily prevented Cayley from publishing papers on heavier-than-air flight, public skepticism and family embarrassment failed to dissuade Cayley from following his passion. Cayley not only engaged in scientific inquiry, he promoted science-based education and its practical use by helping to establish local philosophical societies as well as London’s Polytechnic Institute, where he served as director of the governing board until his death. Throughout his long life Cayley helped forward a variety of scientific disciplines, but aviation truly captured his imagination. Cayley’s efforts resulted in a list of accomplishments far too long to enumerate. A brief selection includes the following firsts: documentation of aerodynamic forces in 1793, flight testing of a winged flyer in 1804, and flight of a manned glider in 1849. Although these and other accomplishments ensured Cayley’s recognition as an expert during his lifetime, his work was soon forgotten after his death and his flyers hidden from view by his son. Fortunately, Cayley’s publications were rediscovered in the late nineteenth century and helped lead to what he knew was possible with advanced engine technology, the world’s first powered and controlled heavier-than-air flight in 1903. While some criticisms can be made concerning the lack of citations and an introduction devoted to historiography, these omissions are understandable, given Dee’s work as an amateur historian and his desire to create a study acceptable to a wider audience. In fact, Dee’s explanation of science in lay terms ensures that this book will appeal to a wide readership. Aviation buffs will enjoy Cayley’s...

CHAPTER 10 - THE GYRO-COMPASS

This paper presents a novel approach to address the challenge of self-localization of flying vehicles. It utilizes visual cues provided by the map imagery fed to a map-recognition convolution neural-network (CNN). This approach is invaluable during the navigation of flying vehicles in scenarios where the Global Positioning System (GPS) signal is unavailable. The proposed approach leverages the power of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to imitate the visual perception and navigation abilities of homing pigeons, enabling the vehicle to navigate using solely real- time visual data with limited or no GPS information. Two pre-trained CNN’s (SqueezeNet and GoogLeNet) are selected and re-trained with Google Maps imagery, enabling them to efficiently learn and generalize from the diverse visual attributes present in the map. Extensive experimentation and evaluation have demonstrated the efficacy and resilience of the vision-based GPS-free navigation system. The resulting system predicts position accurately achieving an accuracy of 89.9% and 96.4% for SqueezeNet and GoogLeNet, respectively, for images with a resolution of (one km x one km) and reaching an accuracy of 94.7 for GoogLeNet for images with a resolution of (374 m x 374 m). Results underscore the potential of this approach for overcoming the challenge of GPS unavailability in aerial navigation.

A Matlab Educational GUI for Analysis of GNSS Coverage and Precision

Aërial navigation, owing to the unusual impetus given to it by the Great War, now promises to result in one of the most profound influences affecting the conditions of modern civilization. It is difficult to realize that only twenty years have elapsed since the program of the First Hague Conference proposed “to prohibit the throwing of projectiles or explosives of any kind from balloons, or by any similar means”; and that one of the express causes inducing the nations of the world to agree to the proposal was the undeveloped character of the art of aviation. Although the treaty was short-lived and expired in 1905, the art had so greatly advanced that a complete change of the attitude of many governments had taken place and the renewal of the treaty was out of the question.The opening of the war inaugurated a feverish competition to perfect every possible type of aircraft for use in attack as well as for reconnaissance. The stern demands of military tactics introduced an entirely new phase in the development of aerial navigation.

Systematic and economic design and evaluation strategies were applied to a computer-generated 4-D aerial navigation system. During the evaluation each of 24 experienced instrument pilots received training in a PLATO-based digital flight simulator using either a keyboard entry/static map, keyboard entry/dynamic map, or touch entry/dynamic map system. Tasks performed during the execution of an area navigation course included continuous flight control, navigation data updating, digital data entry, and amended course plotting. Digital data entry training time was comparable for all three systems but the touch-map proved superior for the plotting tasks, greatly reducing training and task execution times while virtually eliminating errors. Subsequent performance evaluation showed that the touch-map reduced flight path tracking error, increased processing rates on a digit-cancelling secondary task, and increased the accuracy of manual plotting operations. It was concluded that a touch entry system could significantly reduce cockpit workload across a wide range of operational environments.

(1) COL. GOLD is not too well informed about the history of the International Meteorological Committee. The introduction of improvements in the reports and codes has often given rise to animated discussions; for example, when barometric tendency was introduced. It is true that the opponents remained friends, and that the minority co-operated in carrying out the resolutions, but that was a reason not to insist upon the introduction of a resolution which had been adopted by 7 votes against 6.

Scientific Developments in Aerial Navigation

Fast, aerial navigation in cluttered environments requires a suitable map representation for path planning. In this paper, we propose the use of an efficient, structured multiresolution representation that expands the sensor range of dense local grids for memory-constrained platforms. While similar data structures have been proposed, we avoid processing redundant occupancy information and use the organization of the grid to improve efficiency. By layering 3D circular buffers that double in resolution at each level, obstacles near the robot are represented at finer resolutions while coarse spatial information is maintained at greater distances. We also introduce a novel method for efficiently calculating the Euclidean distance transform on the multiresolution grid by leveraging its structure. Lastly, we utilize our proposed framework to demonstrate improved stereo camera-based MAV obstacle avoidance with an optimization-based planner in simulation.

PROF, VAN EVERDINGEN'S outspoken criticism in NATURE of July 22, p. 637, of the meteorological arrangements outlined in Annexe G of the Convention for International Air Navigation is very welcome. Prior to the war the International Meteorological Committee met every three years in friendly gatherings for social intercourse and the transaction of business. Broadly speaking, the difficulties of the members were in obtaining sufficient funds to enable them, in their! respective services, to achieve the ends upon which they were agreed rather than in securing agreement on the desiderata for international exchange. Now that the former difficulties have been largely met as a result of the achievements of meteorology in the war, it would be calamitous if meteorologists failed to overcome the latter, and disturbed the unity of European meteoro-logy at a time when their efforts ought to be directed to achieving unity in world-meteorology.

Various vision-based tasks suffer from inaccurate navigation and poor performance due to inevitable problems, such as adverse weather conditions like haze, fog, rain, snow, and clouds affecting ground and aerial navigation, as well as underwater images being degraded with blue-green tones and mud affecting marine navigation. While most techniques in the literature are designed to restore only one or a few degradations using a single model, using separate architectures for each restoration process is computationally expensive. To address this, an all-in-one Multidomain Attention-based Conditional Generative Adversarial Network (MACGAN) is proposed to improve scene visibility for optimal ground, aerial, and marine navigation, using the same set of parameters across all domains. The MACGAN is a lightweight network with four encoder and decoder blocks and multiple attention blocks in between, which enhances the image restoration process by focusing on the most important features. The performance of MACGAN is compared qualitatively and quantitatively with various state-of-the-art image-to-image translation models, all-in-one adverse weather removal models, and single-effect removal models. Further, MACGAN is tested on real-world unseen image domains, such as smog, dust, fog, rain, snow, and lightning. The results demonstrate that MACGAN can improve scene visibility and has good generalizability. An ablation study is also conducted to assess the impact of the discriminator and attention blocks in MACGAN, and the results confirm the effectiveness of the proposed architecture, which includes a discriminator and three attention blocks.

현재 GPS는 측량 및 지도제작, 측지, 지구물리와 같은 지상부문, 항공기 항법, 항공사진 촬영과 같은 공중부문, 선박의 항법, 수심측량과 같은 해상부문, 위성 궤도, 지구궤도와 같은 우주부문 등 다양한 분야에서 폭넓게 활용되고 있다. 그러나 넓은 활용분야에 비해 정밀 해석의 자료처리를 위해서는 전문지식뿐만 아니라 비용적인 문제로 인해 활용에 제약이 있다. 이에 본 연구에서는 전문지식이 없는 사용자도 GPS 데이터를 이용하여 손쉽게 정밀절대측위 성과를 얻을 수 있도록 C#을 이용하여 웹기반의 GPS 자료처리 솔루션을 개발하였다. 또한, 개발된 솔루션을 이용하여 우리나라가 일본 지진 이후 상시관측소 별로 평균 30mm/year의 지각변동이 나타남을 산출하고, 기존 지각변동 속도와 비교함으로써 지각변위속도 모니터링의 활용가능성을 제시하였다. GPS (Global Positioning System) is currently used widely in the ground section, such as surveying, mapping, geodesy, geophysics, the aviation section, such as aerial navigation and aerial photography, the sea section, including ship navigation and bathymetry, and space section, such as the satellite orbit and Earth's orbit. On the other hand, its use is limited due to the professional knowledge and expense to process the data for precise analysis. As a result, a web-based data processing solution for precise point positioning using GPS data was developed by c# for non-specialized people to process easily. In addition, the crustal movement speed of Korea after an earthquake was calculated to be an average of 30mm/year for each CORS, suggesting that it is possible to monitor crustal movement.

Improvements in Aerial Navigation

We describe a method of classifying or identifying a three-dimensional object from one or more of its silhouettes. The method is based on a low-cost parallel mechanism for computing the slope density, i.e., the density of slopes of the edge of the silhouette. Examples of applications of the method are microscopy and aerial navigation. In both of these applications the object's outline is often the principal clue to its identity, even though other clues, such as texture, color and interior detail may be available. The present study is based on an application of our technique to recognizing aircraft.

This paper proposes a novel vision-aided navigation approach that continuously estimates precise 3D absolute pose for aerial vehicles, using only inertial measurements and monocular camera observations. Our approach is able to provide accurate navigation solutions under long-term GPS outage, by tightly incorporating absolute geo-registered information into two kinds of visual measurements: 2D-3D tie-points, and geo-registered feature tracks. 2D-3D tie-points are established by finding feature correspondences to align an aerial video frame to a 2D geo-referenced image rendered from the 3D terrain database. These measurements provide global information to correct accumulated error in navigation estimation. Geo-registered feature tracks are generated by associating features across consecutive frames. They enable the propagation of 3D geo-referenced values to further improve the pose estimation. All sensor measurements are fully optimized in a smoother-based inference framework, which achieves efficient relinearization and real-time estimation of navigation states and their covariances over a constant-length of sliding window. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach provides accurate and consistent aerial navigation solutions on several large-scale GPS-denied scenarios.