Guidance And Control System Design Of UAV In Aerial Refueling Rendezvous With Visual Simulation

Recently, the usage of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV) tends to be increasing and expanding in many occasions. Aerial refueling will extend the range, shorten the response times, and extend the loiter time of UAVs. This thesis has studied the guidance and control problem of the unmanned receiver aircraft during rendezvous phases in the autonomous aerial refueling.First of all, the commonly used aerial fueling rendezvous methods are introduced. Furthermore,the rendezvous methods and mission requirements of the unmanned receiver are analyzed. The dynamics and kinematics models of receiver are established. In addition, the motion model of the tanker is established. Besides, the reference coordinate system is established.Secondly, two kinds of nonlinear control method are used to design the flight control system of the receiver aircraft. A dynamic inversion based controller is designed to track the path angle commands. In order to improve the control performance in the situation of uncertainties and external disturbances, the flight control law is designed by using backstepping method based on radial basis function neural network. Simulation results show that, in the closed-loop system, precise attitude control is accomplished in spite of the uncertainties and external disturbances in the system.Thirdly, two kinds of guidance system are designed to make the receiver aircraft rendezvous with the tanker. Pure pursuit guidance method via sliding mode approach is designed. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate and analyze the performance of proposed guidance scheme. Furthermore,a path planning method based on Dubins path is designed. The rendezvous guidance system is developed using both Dubins geometric path planning and PN guidance law. The simulation results indicate that the guidance system is well behaved for large regions of initial condition space.Finally, visual simulation system of aerial refueling rendezvous phase is designed based on Vega,MFC and MATLAB. Simulation experiment realizes the rendezvous visualization demonstration.The simulation results indicate that the rendezvous guidance and control system designed in this thesis can guide the unmanned receiver to rendezvous with the tanker successfully. This research can be a reference for unmanned receiver autonomous rendezvous.