Vision/GPS-based docking control for the UAV Autonomous Aerial Refueling

Autonomous Aerial Refueling is an important capacity for the future unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). This paper proposed a vision/GPS based docking control system for the UAV Autonomous Aerial Refueling. An extended Kalman filter (EKF) method has been presented to integrate the information of GPS and machine vision (MV) sensors to obtain the precise relative position of the UAV and the drogue. An improved Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) control law has been designed as the controller of the docking system. The simulation results show that the proposed control scheme can precisely obtain the relative position and realize the safe docking of UAV and tanker.