Di Zhu

Aircraft stands impose asymmetric spatial and procedural constraints that cannot be represented by geometric free space alone. This study proposes a Structured Operation Corridor for unmanned ground support equipment (SOC-UGSE), which converts existing stand markings, aircraft-side boundaries, and operating rules into machine-interpretable corridor constraints and corridor-specific actions. The framework distinguishes a detour-permitted Longitudinal Transfer Corridor (LTC-UGSE) from a no-detour Lateral Service-Approach Corridor (LSAC-UGSE), and maps object class, motion state, distance, corridor occupancy, and available clearance to Normal, Warning, or Stop responses. Standard vision, ranging, LiDAR, and temporal-processing modules are used only to instantiate these decision variables. On a controlled 1:10-scale platform, the implemented perception chain achieved an overall corridor-perception success of 83.9%, while frame-level agreement with rule-derived reference states reached 90.95%. Across 63 independent interaction sequences, sequence-level success was 95.2%, with no complete missed-stop event or prohibited boundary crossing. In a separate balanced comparison of 150 sequences, SOC-UGSE achieved the highest overall scenario-response compliance of 94.7%, outperforming distance-only stopping and corridor-free obstacle avoidance by reducing unnecessary stops and prohibited actions, respectively. These results support the structured-corridor rule-execution concept under controlled scaled-platform conditions, rather than full-scale operational safety or deployment readiness.

With the continuous elevation of aviation safety standards, accurate monitoring of ground support vehicles in aircraft stand areas has become a critical task for enhancing overall aircraft stand operational safety. Given the limitations of existing surface movement radar and multi-camera surveillance systems in terms of cost, deployment complexity, and coverage, this paper proposes a lightweight vision-based framework for vehicle state perception and spatiotemporal behavior analysis oriented toward aircraft stand safety. Leveraging existing fixed monocular monitoring resources in the stand area, the framework first establishes a precise mapping from image pixel coordinates to the physical plane through self-calibration and homography transformation utilizing scene line features, thereby achieving unified spatial measurement of vehicle targets. Subsequently, it integrates an improved lightweight YOLO detector (incorporating Ghost modules and CBAM for noise suppression) with the ByteTrack tracking algorithm to enable stable extraction of vehicle trajectories under complex occlusion conditions. Finally, by combining functional zone division within the stand, a semantic map is constructed, and a behavior analysis method based on a spatiotemporal finite state machine is proposed. This method performs joint reasoning by fusing multi-dimensional constraints including position, zone, and time, enabling automatic detection of abnormal behaviors such as “intrusion into restricted areas” and “abnormal stop.” Quantitative evaluations demonstrate the framework’s efficacy: it achieves an average physical localization error (RMSE) of 0.32 m, and the improved detection model reaches an accuracy (mAP@50) of 90.4% for ground support vehicles. In tests simulating typical violation scenarios, the system achieved high recall (96.0%) and precision (95.8%) rates in detecting ‘area intrusion’ and ‘abnormal stop’ violations, respectively. These results, achieved using only existing surveillance cameras, validate its potential as a cost-effective and easily deployable tool to augment existing safety monitoring systems for airport ground operations.