Measurement of aircraft attitude is a necessary step for the autonomous control of the aircraft. Autonomous aircraft are useful for a range of military and civilian purposes. A method of very low computational complexity is presented that allows the pitch and roll angles of an aircraft to be measured onboard an unmanned aircraft from real-time video of the horizon. This method can be used for maintaining level flight, and also provides a degree of automatic terrain avoidance. Introduction: In this Letter, a simple, novel method for extracting the aircraft roll and pitch angles from a single view of the visible horizon from the front of the aircraft and also for calculating the confidence in the measurement is discussed. The following ideas are introduced:
Sensing the horizon using an FPGA was used to measure the pitch and roll angles of the aircraft REF .
Aircraft attitude estimation from horizon video
Electronics Letters
Engineering