DragonFly

A wide-area motion imaging system provides 360° persistent surveillance with a camera array that is small, light-weight, and operates at low power. The camera array is mounted on a tethered drone, which can hover at heights of up to 400′, and includes small imagers fitted with lenses of different fixed focal lengths. The tether provides power, communication, and a data link from the camera array to a ground processing server that receives, processes and stores the imagery. The server also collects absolute and relative position data from a global positioning system (GPS) receiver and an inertial measurement unit (IMU) carried by the drone. The server uses this position data to correct the rolling shutter effect and to stabilize and georectify the final images, which can be stitched together and shown to a user live or in playback via a separate user interface.

Researchers

William Ross / Cindy Fang / Lauren White / Joseph Bari / William Cason / Donald Johnson / Christopher Bowen / Kyle Bojanowski / Victoria Dye

Departments: Lincoln Laboratory
Technology Areas: Communication Systems: Optical / Industrial Engineering & Automation: Autonomous Systems / Sensing & Imaging: Optical Sensing
Impact Areas: Advanced Materials

  • wide-area motion imaging systems and methods
    United States of America | Granted | 11,662,727

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