The Navy and Marine Corps will increasingly need to operate unmanned air vehicles from ships at sea. Fused multi-sensor systems are desirable to ensure these operations are highly reliable under the most demanding at-sea conditions, particularly in degraded visual environments. The US Navy Sea-Based Automated Launch & Recovery System (SALRS) program aims at enabling automated/semi-automated launch and recovery of sea-based, manned and unmanned, fixed- and rotary-wing naval aircraft, and to utilize automated or pilot-augmented flight mechanics for carefree shipboard operations. This paper describes the goals and current results of SALRS Phase 1, which aims at understanding the capabilities and limitations of various sensor types through sensor characterization, modeling, and simulation, and assessing how the sensor models can be used for aircraft navigation to provide sufficient accuracy, integrity, continuity, and availability across all anticipated maritime conditions.

Date Published: 21 May 2015
PDF: 13 pages
Proc. SPIE 9471, Degraded Visual Environments: Enhanced, Synthetic, and External Vision Solutions 2015, 94710G (21 May 2015); doi: 10.1117/12.2176533

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9471:
Degraded Visual Environments: Enhanced, Synthetic, and External Vision Solutions 2015
Jack Sanders-Reed; Jarvis J. Arthur III, Editor(s)