Developments in Airborne ‘High Precision’ Digital Photo Flight Navigation in ‘Realtime’

Abstract

At the Institute of Geodesy and Navigation’ a completely integrated digital photo navigation system is under development.

The objective of this system is to support the customer through computer integration from project planning via photoflight guidance to post-mission data evaluation. With this integrated system, we expect a dramatic increase in photogrammetric productivity by saving time and money and improving mission data quality.

The system consists currently of two major parts, the ‘off-line’ mission planning program ‘VAMP’ and the ‘on-line’ mission navigation system ‘SANC’. The ‘Visual Aided Mission Planning’ program is based on Windows 3.1 and integrates the capabilities of project planning with photoflight and VFR-flight planning on an underlying objectoriented GIS-database, running on standard PC hardware. The ‘Satellite Aided Navigation Copilot’ system enables realtime DGPS position, velocity and attitude determination and navigatiopn in different modi, according to the required precision level, dependent on photogrammetric map scale. First, the tests have shown the potential for flight guidance and photogrammetric imaging with the availability of attitude information. Second, a lot of benefit results from a completely integrated planning and navigation system with ‘state-of-the-art’ visulization.