US 11,727,818 B1
Aircraft surface state event track system and method
William Colligan, Vienna, VA (US); Eric R Chartier, St Louis Park, MN (US); Paul Davis, San Jose, CA (US); Andrew Murphy, Washington, DC (US); and Douglas Sweet, Sunnyvale, CA (US)
Assigned to Architecture Technology Corporation, Minneapolis, MN (US)
Filed by Architecture Technology Corporation, Minneapolis, MN (US)
Filed on Dec. 6, 2021, as Appl. No. 17/542,913.
Application 17/542,913 is a continuation of application No. 16/357,216, filed on Mar. 18, 2019, granted, now 11,195,423.
Int. Cl. G08G 5/00 (2006.01); B64D 45/00 (2006.01)
CPC G08G 5/0078 (2013.01) [B64D 45/00 (2013.01); G08G 5/0008 (2013.01); G08G 5/0013 (2013.01); G08G 5/0026 (2013.01); G08G 5/0043 (2013.01); G08G 5/0082 (2013.01); B64D 2045/0075 (2013.01)] 18 Claims
OG exemplary drawing
 
1. An automatic and autonomous aircraft surface state event track system for tracking, without aircrew input or monitoring, aircraft state for an airplane operating on movement areas and non-movement areas of an airport, comprising:
a processor on the airplane; and
an application, the application comprising a non-transitory-computer-readable storage medium with machine instructions, the application in communication with the processor and in communication with one or more sensors existing on the airplane; wherein the processor executes the machine instructions to:
identify aircraft surface state events on the movement areas and the non-movement areas, comprising:
control the one or more sensors existing on the airplane, through the application, to produce sensor signals and to provide the produced sensor signals to the application, wherein the application provides digital representations of the sensor signals to the processor; and
the processor, using the provided digital representations, identifying aircraft progression toward one or more of the aircraft surface state events, comprising:
estimating a time of arrival at each of the aircraft surface state events,
generating a confidence level for each time of arrival, and
providing time of arrival estimates and corresponding confidence levels to local and center flight control systems.