Patents by Inventor Christopher J. Musial

Christopher J. Musial has filed for patents to protect the following inventions. This listing includes patent applications that are pending as well as patents that have already been granted by the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO).

  • Patent number: 7876258
    Abstract: A collision sense and avoidance system and method and an aircraft, such as an Unmanned Air Vehicle (UAV) and/or Remotely Piloted Vehicle (RPV), including the collision sense and avoidance system. The collision sense and avoidance system includes an image interrogator identifies potential collision threats to the aircraft and provides maneuvers to avoid any identified threat. Motion sensors (e.g., imaging and/or infrared sensors) provide image frames of the surroundings to a clutter suppression and target detection unit that detects local targets moving in the frames. A Line Of Sight (LOS), multi-target tracking unit, tracks detected local targets and maintains a track history in LOS coordinates for each detected local target. A threat assessment unit determines whether any tracked local target poses a collision threat. An avoidance maneuver unit provides flight control and guidance with a maneuver to avoid any identified said collision threat.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: March 13, 2006
    Date of Patent: January 25, 2011
    Assignee: The Boeing Company
    Inventors: Michael R. Abraham, Christian C. Witt, Dennis J. Yelton, John N. Sanders-Reed, Christopher J. Musial
  • Patent number: 7466243
    Abstract: A hardware system for passively detecting wires from a mobile transportation system is provided. The hardware system includes a main processor in the hardware system that uses plural commands to manage a preprocessor module and a linker module, wherein the pre-processing module pre-processes a digital image taken from a digital camera of the transport system and reduces non-wire like clutter from the digital image and identifies pixels that can be classified as wire like; and the linker module links the identified pixels to determine if a wire like structure is present and a binary output from the linker module is sent to an output select module that allows a user to select a video output.
    Type: Grant
    Filed: October 13, 2005
    Date of Patent: December 16, 2008
    Assignee: The Boeing Company
    Inventors: Christian C. Witt, Dennis J. Yelton, James C. Hansen, Christopher J. Musial