Date of Award

3-2021

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Department

Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering

First Advisor

Scott L. Nykl, PhD

Abstract

Remotely Piloted Aircraft (RPA) are currently unable to refuel mid-air due to the large communication delays between their operators and the aircraft. AAR seeks to address this problem by reducing the communication delay to a fast line-of-sight signal between the tanker and the RPA. Current proposals for AAR utilize stereo cameras to estimate where the receiving aircraft is relative to the tanker, but require accurate calibrations for accurate location estimates of the receiver. This paper improves the accuracy of this calibration by improving three components of it: increasing the quantity of intrinsic calibration data with CNN preprocessing, improving the quality of the intrinsic calibration data through a novel linear regression filter, and reducing the epipolar error of the stereo calibration with optical flow for feature matching and alignment. A combination of all three approaches resulted in significant epipolar error improvements over OpenCV's stereo calibration while also providing significant precision improvements.

AFIT Designator

AFIT-ENG-MS-21-M-056

DTIC Accession Number

AD1132785

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