Aircraft docking guidance refers to a process of guiding an arriving aircraft from an end of a taxiway to a parking position at an apron and guiding the aircraft to stop at a designated exact position. The aim of the docking guidance is to ensure safe and accurate docking of the arriving aircraft, to facilitate accurate cooperation of the aircraft with various ground interfaces (ground crews), and to make the passenger boarding bridge (PBB) accurately connected to the aircraft door and thereby improve the efficiency and safety of the airport.
Automated aircraft docking guidance systems may be divided into the following categories depending on the types of the employed sensors:
(1) buried loop coils category; (2) laser scanning and ranging category; (3) visual perception category.
The automated guidance systems of the laser scanning and ranging category and the visual perception category can obtain visual information about an aircraft being docked, the two categories of automated aircraft docking guidance systems can be called as visual docking guidance systems.
The automated guidance systems using buried loop coils detect whether there is a metal object passing or stopping to determine the position of an arriving aircraft. The systems using the buried loop coils have advantages such as fast response speed, low costs and no requirements on weather and illumination, but these systems are not accurate and have low anti-interference capability. Also, leads and electronic elements buried in the ground can be broken easily and have low reliability, and such elements have low measurement accuracy, cannot identify aircraft types, and are less debuggable and maintainable.
The automated docking guidance systems of the laser scanning and ranging category determine information such as positions, speeds and types of aircrafts by laser scanning and ranging, are less influenced by environment illumination and weather, have high accuracy and are debuggable and maintainable.
The automated docking guidance systems of the visual perception category obtain image information about the procedure of aircraft docking by optical imaging, and determine information such as positions, speeds and types of the aircrafts being docked based on intelligent information process technologies. These systems have advantages such as simple structure, low costs, high intelligent level, being debuggable and maintainable, but have shortcomings of high requirements on weather and illumination and poor adaptability.
With continuous development of visual perception technologies, intelligent information process technologies and computer technologies, visual aircraft docking guidance technologies(systems) can obtain docking information about aircrafts being docked accurately and fast, and have been widely applied in docking guidance systems of many airports.
Visual Docking Guidance System (VDGS) designed by Honeywell and Video Docking System (VDOCKS) designed by Siemens, as international leading level visual guidance devices, have been applied in various airport across the world.
However, these systems require specific weather and illumination conditions, have poor adaptability, are lack of intelligent information process capability, and are less accurate.