Ship-Based Helicopter Position/Motion Resolving Instrumentation System

The Navy needs a portable system to measure a helicopter's position, rates, and accelerations as it approaches a ship to land. The system must be generic to accommodate a variety of helicopters and flight decks. The system must acquire the approaching helicopter, track it to touchdown and measure its position relative to a fixed earth and a fixed ship coordinate system. Since a video record of the helicopter approach is required anyway, a logical choice for the sensor would be a video camera. Integrated Sensors, Incoporated (ISI) has developed a fast, non-contact, displacement and orientation object tracker that can perform real-time passive helicopter position measurement. Consisting on only three major hardware components--one passive sensor, a high speed signal and data processor, and decals or templates to identify points on a tracked object--this object motion tracker measures the six degrees-of-freedom required to fully characterize the absolute spatial pose of an object (three displacements and three rotations). A camera could be placed on the ship (not necessarily on the flight deck) so that the tracking system could locate the position and orientation of the helicopter in three-dimensional space.