NASA develops a pod for pilotless autonomous aircraft

JAKARTA – Autonomous aircraft, system-controlled air transport, must study the environment to avoid danger during flight. Therefore, this aircraft needs a camera sensor.

Armstrong Flight Research Center, research resources for proprietary aircraft NASAdeveloped a camera pod with special sensors for autonomous flight. This pod is called by Aerial instrumentation for real-world video of urban environments (AIRVIEW).

This device was attached to one of the manned helicopters at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. NASA said the helicopter with this pod was flown by researchers as part of the first phase of testing.

The team developing AIRVUE hopes the pod can be used to collect visual data about weather and other obstacles in the sky. This data set will provide cloud state information to manufacturers of air taxis or autonomous aircraft.

“Data is the fuel for machine learning,” said AIRVUE Project Principal Investigator Nelson Brown, “We hope to spur innovation by providing realistic flight scenarios for the computer vision community. ”

Brown said this data set is important to get into driving assistance, whether with a driver or not. Until now, no open databases captured using pods have been available in the aviation sector.

AIRVUE has a computer algorithm that is claimed to work in a variety of flight conditions and is accurate. Once the pod design is complete, the researchers will conduct further evaluation and testing so that they can produce more pods.