Flight system design for a receiver aircraft to perform autonomous aerial refueling provided with relative position data link

An automatic aerial refueling system was developed that is capable of controlling the receiving aircraft to rendezvous, dock and station keep the receiver refueling probe in the tanker refueling probe. The automatic refueling system consisted of an active trajectory generator, a guidance system and a control system. The active trajectory generator continuously updated the commanded rendezvous trajectory to be flown by the receiver aircraft. This active trajectory generator concept incorporated design variables that the designer could use to specify the time sequence of the rendezvous and docking maneuver. The output of the trajectory generator was then the command to the flight systems guidance and control systems. To demonstrate this automatic aerial refueling system concept, a detailed design of the flight system algorithms was done for typical aerial refueling mission with a heavy jet tanker aircraft similar to the KC135 and the SIAI-Marchetti S-211 Jet Trainer as a receiver aircraft. The systems gains were selected to minimize the control surface activity while achieving adequate tracking. A simulation was developed that included the flight system algorithms, linear models of the receiver aircraft, atmospheric and tanker wake disturbance models. The performance of the aerial refueling system design was then evaluated in a batch computer simulator. The simulation study demonstrated results showed better disturbance rejection relative to the controller performance while minimizing the utilization of the control surfaces. Results also demonstrated the ability to schedule rendezvous.