Using Roads for Autonomous Air Vehicle Guidance

This is a study on the development of a road following vision-based guidance system for unmanned air vehicles (UAV) in real world applications. Currently, autonomous navigation requires the use of GPS. In many applications, however, dependence on GPS is undesirable. GPS signals are weak and can be jammed easily. Also, GPS waypoints may not be up-to-date. In recent years, vision-based navigation has been gaining popularity. Vision-based guidance requires existence of visible paths or extended landmarks for air vehicles to detect and follow. Roads are the most commonly available path to follow. Moreover, the abundance of events that happen along roads make them appealing subjects of surveillance. Many road detection (single images) and road tracking (videos) algorithms have been proposed in the literature. Fast detection and tracking has been the emphasis of those intended for UAVs. Due to the complexity of road detection, we not only need advanced software but also the most effective sensors. In this paper, we propose a road following algorithm that uses both RGB camera and hyperspectral sensor and report the results of actual test flights conducted in different locations and different seasons.