Deep Monocular Visual Odometry for fixed-winged Aircraft : Exploring Deep-VO designed for ground use in a high altitude aerial environment

Sammanfattning: In aviation, safety is a big concern. Knowing the position of an aircraft at all times is of high importance. Today most aircraft utilize Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS) for localization and precision navigation because of the small position error which do not increase over time. However, recent research show that GNSS can easily be jammed or spoofed. An alternative navigation method is Visual Odometry (VO). VO is navigation through visual input and is a key-part in development of fully autonomous vehicles. This thesis investigates the Deep Learning-based Visual Odometry (DL-VO) for aircraft at altitudes over 100 m. DL-VO deployed at high altitude is almost none existing. Therefore, this thesis investigates the deployments of ground developed DL-VO in the aerial domain. DeepVO is a Frame-To-Frame optical flow estimation method which is trained supervised and end-to-end. The domain change, from ground to high altitude aerial, brought bigger issues and had larger impact on the performance than first though. The use of full 6 Degrees of Freedom (DoF) pose estimation increases the complexity and was much harder than 2D estimation (x, y, yaw). A good angle representation was of higher importance during training and testing in the aerial domain. Since in the aerial domain the full 3D rotation is not unique in all representations of the orientation and issues with Gimbal lock can occur. Results on simulated data show that the propose method fails to estimate 6 DoF poses. However, the reduced 2D estimations shows that a trajectory can be maintained even is drift is present. The result on real world dataset shows that it easier to recover scale at lower speeds and with a less down angled camera. The difference between simulated and non-simulated data has not been investigated to the extent that a fair assessment on how the method’s performance is affected by the data character.