System for Multi-Ship Brown-Out Helicopter Landings

Brownout is the number one operational problem facing military rotorcraft today. Visual obscuration, combined with nose-up attitude during landing, make identification of landing area hazards difficult or impossible. Landing multiple helicopters is even more difficult, since the trailing aircraft must contend with the dust cloud resulting from landing the lead aircraft. To address this problem, CG2 is proposing a system that combines data from a LIDAR sensor and CCD or IR cameras mounted on the lead aircraft with user input regarding the flight profile parameters and telemetry from each of the aircraft in the formation to produce recommended flight profiles and synthetic vision displays that allow all of the aircraft to land safely. The system will generate a virtual scene using geometry extracted from the LIDAR data combined with correlated camera imagery so that objects may be identified more easily. The aircraft telemetry will be used to render a real-time scene that accurately depicts the position and orientation of each ship relative to the terrain, with a choice of viewpoints. The solution will be validated in a simulation environment as well as with real sensors, and be capable of running on ruggedized, embedded hardware.