Sensor Fusion Project
Aerospace Applications North America was part of the Sensor Fusion Team, a combined NASA/Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) effort to investigate how new procedures, techniques and displays can make flight inspections easier, safer and cheaper.
Flight inspections ensure the integrity of instrument approaches and airway procedures that constitute the National Airspace System infrastructure. This is accomplished through airborne inspection of all space and ground based instrument flight procedures and instrumentation. Up to today this is a tedious, expensive and sometimes even very dangerous process.
The contribution of our team for this project was as follows:
- Implement Head-Up Display (HUD) components in C++ and OpenGL, as well as three-dimensional Augmented Reality (AR) visual aids to support the flight inspection missions and to facilitate pilot operations during flight instrument approaches.
- Support the design and implementation of a flight inspection operator station located on an FAA-provided Challenger 604 jet aircraft, including 3 forward-facing cameras in the cockpit and a 3-panel display system in the back of the airplane.
- Define the operational scenarios, prepare briefings and evaluation questionnaires, and support a 3-day test campaign of the technology at Ellington Field (EFD) airport in Houston, involving NASA astronauts and test pilots.