Systems and methods for the calculation of relative distances and speeds in the three coordinate axis between aircraft in flight

摘要

The invention provides systems and methods of low cost and high precision to compute relative distances and speeds between, for example, a tanker aircraft (13) and a receiver aircraft (11) during a refuelling operation. The core of the invention is identifying the coordinates x, y, z of the trajectory of a pattern point (45) of the receiver aircraft (11) from a sequence of digital frames (35, 35', ...) obtained with a video camera (31) placed in the tanker aircraft (13) in a suitable position to visualize frontally the receiver aircraft (11).