Control design of an aerial refueling system using a combination of machine vision and GPS taking into account the vortex flow effects of the refueling aircraft

The purpose of aerial refueling is to solve the problem of limiting the amount of fuel carried, a technique to increase range and endurance. In this paper, the control design of an air refueling system using a combination of machine vision and GPS with iterated uncented Kalman filter is, taking into account the vortex effects of the tanker aircraft and atmospheric turbulence. Since the docking phase between two aircraft is very sensitive, challenging and has a direct effect on the success of the aerial refueling process, a control is designed to guide the probe to the moving drogue and then hold the probe at that stage until the air refueling process is complete. For this purpose, first, the receiver aircraft is modeled in the presence of atmospheric turbulence effects and the vortex of the tanker aircraft. Then an LQR control system between probe and drogue based on the combination of machine vision and GPS for aerial refueling was proposed. An iterated uncented Kalman filter method for data integration is also proposed to obtain the exact relative position between the receiver aircraft and the drogue. After software implementation and simulation, good performance is obtained with the LQR control rule for connecting the receiving aircraft to the refueling aircraft. The simulation results show that the proposed control scheme can achieve exactly the relative position and realize a safe and successful connection between the two flying devices.