gps-denied-onboard/_docs/00_problem/acceptance_criteria.md

# Acceptance Criteria

> Last revised 2026-05-07 (cleanup pass: stripped algorithm/library/parameter implementation details; renamed source label `vo_extrapolated` → `visual_propagated`; broadened FC scope to ArduPilot + iNav). See git history for prior versions.

## Position Accuracy
- **AC-1.1** — Frame-center GPS within **50 m** of true GPS for **≥80%** of normal-flight photos.
- **AC-1.2** — Frame-center GPS within **20 m** of true GPS for **≥50%** of normal-flight photos.
- **AC-1.3** — Cumulative drift between two consecutive satellite-anchored fixes: **<100 m** visual-only / **<50 m** with IMU fused. Measured as ‖propagated centre − next anchor centre‖ at anchor fix. Every estimate carries `last_satellite_anchor_age_ms`; validation binned by anchor age. The solution must define the max anchor age beyond which estimates degrade to `visual_propagated` / `dead_reckoned` with monotonically growing covariance.
- **AC-1.4** — Each estimate reports: 95% covariance ellipse semi-major axis (m) AND a label `{satellite_anchored, visual_propagated, dead_reckoned}`.

## Image Processing Quality
- **AC-2.1a — Frame-to-frame registration**: succeeds for **>95%** of normal flight segments (defined: nadir ±10° bank/pitch, ≥40% prior-frame overlap, daytime, usable texture, no full visual blackout).
- **AC-2.1b — Satellite-anchor registration**: measured separately from AC-2.1a; must satisfy AC-1.1/1.2 accuracy, AC-2.2 cross-domain MRE, AC-8.2 freshness, AC-8.6 retrieval behaviour.
- **AC-2.2** — Mean Reprojection Error: **<1.0 px** frame-to-frame; **<2.5 px** satellite-anchored cross-domain.

## Resilience & Edge Cases
- **AC-3.1** — Tolerate up to **350 m** outliers between two consecutive photos (airframe tilt up to ±20°).
- **AC-3.2** — Tolerate sharp turns: <5% overlap, <200 m drift, <70° heading change. Sharp-turn frames may fail frame-to-frame registration; recovery via satellite-reference re-localization.
- **AC-3.3** — Handle **≥3 disconnected segments** per flight via satellite-reference re-localization. Core capability, not degraded mode.
- **AC-3.4** — On ≥3 consecutive frames AND ≥2 s without a position, request operator re-loc via telemetry; continue dead-reckoned propagation; FC uses last known + IMU extrapolation.
- **AC-3.5 — Visual blackout + spoofed GPS** (clouds/occlusion/whiteout while FC reports GPS denial/spoof):
  - Switch label to `{dead_reckoned}` within ≤1 processed frame OR ≤400 ms.
  - Reject spoofed GPS as estimator input.
  - Propagate from last trusted state + FC IMU/attitude/airspeed/altitude until visual or satellite anchoring recovers.
  - Covariance grows monotonically.
  - `horiz_accuracy` field of the GPS message to the FC must not under-report the 95% covariance semi-major axis.
  - `VISUAL_BLACKOUT_IMU_ONLY` STATUSTEXT to QGroundControl at 1–2 Hz.

## Real-Time Onboard Performance
- **AC-4.1** — End-to-end latency (camera capture → GPS to FC) **<400 ms p95**. Up to ~10% frames may drop under sustained load.
- **AC-4.2** — Memory **<8 GB shared** on Jetson Orin Nano Super.
- **AC-4.3 — FC output contract**: WGS84 coordinates over MAVLink, via the standard external-positioning message type(s) accepted by ArduPilot and iNav. Honest covariance carried in the field the FC uses for outlier rejection (under-reported covariance is a defect, see AC-NEW-4). Source-label semantics per AC-1.4. Implementation may emit a primary GPS-substitute message and, when the estimator delivers full 6-DoF covariance + quality above a configured threshold, an optional auxiliary external-odometry message. Per-FC message selection and FC-side parameter wiring are design decisions.
- **AC-4.4** — Estimates streamed frame-by-frame; no batching/delay.
- **AC-4.5** — System may refine prior estimates and emit corrections.

## Startup & Failsafe
- **AC-5.1** — Initialise from FC EKF's last valid GPS + IMU-extrapolated position at GPS denial.
- **AC-5.2** — On >3 s without estimate, FC falls back to IMU-only dead reckoning; system logs failure. Verify in production param sets of each supported FC (ArduPilot Plane SITL + iNav SITL or equivalent).
- **AC-5.3** — On companion reboot mid-flight, re-initialise from FC's current IMU-extrapolated position. Cold-start TTFF in AC-NEW-1.

## Ground Station & Telemetry
- **AC-6.1** — Position estimates + confidence stream to QGroundControl over MAVLink at **1–2 Hz** downsampled (high-rate stays on local FDR).
- **AC-6.2** — GCS may send commands (e.g., operator re-loc hint) via standard MAVLink (`STATUSTEXT`, `NAMED_VALUE_FLOAT`) or a custom dialect.
- **AC-6.3** — Output coordinates in WGS84.

## Object Localization (AI Camera)
- **AC-7.1** — AI systems may request GPS for AI-camera-detected objects. Accuracy consistent with frame-center accuracy in level flight (bank/pitch <5°). In maneuvering flight, error bounded by `altitude × |sin(unknown_bank_or_pitch)|` and that bound is published alongside the estimate.
- **AC-7.2** — Object coordinates computed trigonometrically from current UAV position, AI-camera gimbal angle, zoom, and altitude. Flat-terrain assumption.

## Satellite Reference Imagery
- **AC-8.1** — Imagery via Azaion Suite Satellite Service (offline cache interface; no direct commercial-provider calls). Cache-interface resolution ≥0.5 m/px, ideally 0.3 m/px.
- **AC-8.2** — Tile freshness: <6 mo (active-conflict sectors), <12 mo (stable rear). Older → reject or downgrade (AC-NEW-6).
- **AC-8.3** — Imagery pre-loaded onto companion before flight; offline preprocessing time not time-critical. Pre-extracted descriptors/indices count against the cache budget unless explicitly carved out.
- **AC-8.4** — Mid-flight tile generation: continuously orthorectify nav-camera frames into basemap-projected tiles, deduplicated (latest/highest-quality wins). Upload to Service on landing. Each uploaded tile carries quality metadata sufficient for the Service's ingest pipeline (AC-NEW-7).
- **AC-8.5** — No raw nav-camera or AI-camera frames retained in normal operation; tiles are the only persistent imagery. Forensic exception: ≤0.1 Hz thumbnail log of frames that failed tile generation, within FDR budget (AC-NEW-3).
- **AC-8.6 — Satellite-anchor relocalization robustness**:
  - **Scale-ratio**: any UAV-frame ground footprint at the deployment altitude band must be retrievable from the cache regardless of internal tiling/indexing.
  - **Scene change in active-conflict sectors**: cratering / building destruction / road realignment must not collapse retrieval recall, measured against a labelled change-pair dataset over season-matched tiles. No `satellite_anchored` label on stale-tile match (per AC-NEW-6).
  - **Compute & latency**: relocalization must remain inside AC-4.1 latency + AC-4.2 memory budgets under both steady-state and re-loc-trigger workloads.

## Additional AC

### AC-NEW-1 — Cold-start TTFF
**Statement.** From companion boot, first valid external-position MAVLink frame **<30 s p95**, given an IMU-extrapolated initial position from FC EKF.
**Why.** Mid-flight reboot is realistic on 8 h missions; FC dead-reckons during the gap, ~500 m drift max at 60 km/h.
**Validation.** Cold-boot 50× with simulated FC pose; measure boot → first frame; pass = 95th percentile <30 s.

### AC-NEW-2 — Spoofing-promotion latency
**Statement.** When FC signals GPS denial/spoof, promote onboard estimate to FC's primary position source within **<3 s p95**.
**Why.** Without this, FC may follow a spoofed source while a valid onboard estimate sits idle; 3 s rides out one-frame anomalies but blocks malicious heading changes.
**Validation.** SITL on each supported FC (ArduPilot Plane + iNav, production param sets): inject false GPS, measure spoof onset → promotion; pass = 95th percentile <3 s on both.

### AC-NEW-3 — Flight Data Recorder
**Statement.** Per flight, retain to NVM: per-frame estimates with covariance + source-label; FC IMU traces (full rate); all emitted external-position MAVLink frames; raw MAVLink stream (tlog); system health (CPU/GPU/temp/throttle); mid-flight tiles (AC-8.4); ≤0.1 Hz thumbnail log of failed tile-gen frames. **No raw nav-cam/AI-cam frames** (AC-8.5). Cap **64 GB / flight**; oldest segment dropped first on rollover.
**Why.** Tiles + telemetry + IMU reproduce the mission, feed next mission's cache (AC-8.4), explain false-position events (AC-NEW-4). Raw frames are large + redundant once tiles exist.
**Validation.** 8 h synthetic load (3 Hz nav frames replayed); assert FDR ≤64 GB; no payload class silently dropped without a logged rollover.

### AC-NEW-4 — False-position safety budget
**Statement.** Per flight: **P(error >500 m) <0.1 %**, **P(error >1 km) <0.01 %**.
**Why.** A single 1-km-off frame can fly the UAV outside the geofence; covariance carried in the MAVLink message is the FC's only defense.
**Validation.** Monte Carlo over a public aerial-localization dataset (e.g. AerialVL S03) + own recorded flights; report error CDF; pass = both probabilities below budget across ≥100 flights.

### AC-NEW-5 — Operational environmental envelope
**Statement.** Operating temp **−20 °C to +50 °C**; vibration/shock per RTCA DO-160G low-altitude UAV-class. Cooling sustains **25 W** at the upper temp for the full **8-hour duty cycle** without throttling.
**Why.** Without this, all latency/accuracy AC are conditional on a benign thermal day; +35 °C bay temps cause Jetson to throttle to 15 W, collapsing the 400 ms latency budget.
**Validation.** Hot-soak: 25 W @ +50 °C for 8 h, no throttle. Cold-soak: −20 °C cold-start within AC-NEW-1.

### AC-NEW-6 — Imagery freshness enforcement
**Statement.** System rejects (or downgrades) any tile whose capture date violates AC-8.2. Mid-flight tiles (AC-8.4) not yet uploaded are timestamped current and treated as fresh.
**Why.** Stale tiles are the dominant cross-view-matching failure mode in active-conflict sectors; a confident match on a stale tile is worse than no match.
**Validation.** Inject synthetic-age tiles; verify rejection/decay matches spec; verify stale-tile match never produces `satellite_anchored`.

### AC-NEW-7 — Cache-poisoning safety budget
**Statement.** Per flight, across all onboard tiles written (AC-8.4): **P(geo-misalign >30 m) <1 %**, **P(>100 m) <0.1 %**.
**Why.** Onboard tiles feed back into the Service basemap (AC-8.4). A bad onboard pose with optimistic covariance writes a misaligned tile that becomes the next flight's anchor — cross-flight error compounding that AC-NEW-4 doesn't capture.
**External-dependency note.** The Suite Satellite Service is expected to operate a multi-flight ingest-side voting layer that gates onboard-tile promotion to "trusted basemap" until multiple independent flights agree on geo-alignment. Voting algorithm is the Service's concern; onboard's job (AC-8.4) is to publish per-tile quality metadata sufficient for that layer. End-to-end AC-NEW-7 evidence depends on this Service contract.
**Validation.** Multi-flight Monte Carlo replay over public datasets (e.g. AerialVL, AerialExtreMatch) + own flights, with synthetic over-confidence injection (deflate covariance ×1.5–3): assert both probabilities below budget across ≥100 flights. Independently exercise the Service-side voting contract.

### AC-NEW-8 — Visual blackout + GPS spoofing degraded mode
**Statement.** When the navigation camera is fully unusable AND FC reports GPS denial/spoof:
- continue emitting external-position MAVLink frames from IMU-only propagation for **≤30 s** after the last trusted anchor (or until covariance trips fail threshold);
- label every estimate `{dead_reckoned}`; degrade MAVLink fix-quality to "2D fix or worse" when 95% covariance semi-major axis **>100 m**;
- escalate to "no fix" (`horiz_accuracy=999.0`) + `VISUAL_BLACKOUT_FAILSAFE` STATUSTEXT when 95% covariance >**500 m** OR blackout >**30 s** without a trusted re-anchor;
- never promote spoofed real-GPS back into the estimator unless FC GPS health stable + non-spoofed for **≥10 s** AND a visual/satellite consistency check has succeeded.
**Why.** During cloud/whiteout + spoofing, no honest correction is available; only safe behaviour is IMU-only dead reckoning with rapidly-growing uncertainty, never pretending stale visual or spoofed GPS remains valid.
**Validation.** SITL/replay on each FC: inject 5 s / 15 s / 35 s blackouts while spoofing GPS; assert mode transition ≤400 ms, spoofed GPS ignored, covariance grows monotonically, MAVLink fields degrade at thresholds, recovery only via trusted anchor or 10-s GPS-health + visual-consistency gate.