NASA Camera Pods Gather Data To Support Autonomous Flight Technology
Equipment has been used for flight trials fitted on a helicopter
NASA is using a specially developed camera pod packed with sensors to support the development of computer vision technology for autonomous flight. The agency’s Airborne Instrumentation for Real-world Video of Urban Environments (AIRVUE) pod has been mounted on a helicopter and is in service for flight testing by researchers at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
The equipment, which was developed and built at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center in Edwards, California, is collecting a wide array of visual data sets showing weather and other obstacles to autonomous flight. NASA’s objective is to build a data cloud that can be used by developers of eVTOL aircraft and drones to assess what their autonomous flight control systems can “see.”
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