Automatic Judging for Precision Aerobatics

Assisting or replacing human judges in aerobatic competitions offers an opportunity to reduce the natural subjectivity associated with human scoring and makes it possible to run continuous competitions globally without the environmental overheads of international travel. Automatic judging is accomplished here by segmenting a flight trajectory into defined maneuvers and then assessing the elements of those maneuvers against a defined baseline. This allows the scoring technique to be unambiguously applied. Computed results indicate reasonable correlation between automatic and human-derived scores, and an expanding database has been built to further accumulate flight data and scores for future development. Additional possible applications of the process include pilot training and piloted system verification and validation against the requirements documentation.