Docking Guidance Technology For Aerial Refueling Of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

UAV has been widely used in modern warfare,undertaking various important tasks such as information acquisition,military investigation and attack.Autonomous aerial refueling technology of UAV can increase the flight radius and payload of UAV,and provide more time for UAV to perform tasks.It is the focus of research in the field of UAV at home and abroad.Aiming at the problem of precise guidance in soft air refueling of UAV in complex environment,this paper carries out the research of visual recognition and guidance technology,visual/DGPS guidance data fusion technology,and builds a demonstration and verification platform for UAV aerial refueling flight.Finally,the aerial refueling guidance technology studied in this paper is validated and analyzed by means of actual flight test.Firstly,aiming at the requirement of UAV flexible aerial refueling flight verification,the overall design of UAV refueling and receiving platform is carried out,the unmanned refueling/receiving aircraft system is built,the key mission equipment such as cone sleeve/hose pod and receiving rod is developed,and the aerial refueling vision/DGPS guidance system is designed,which lays the foundation for aerial refueling flight test.Secondly,in view of the complex background environment in the process of soft aerial refueling of UAV,a multi-target recognition algorithm based on Faster-RCNN algorithm for long-range recognition of UAV/short-range recognition cone sleeve is proposed.On this basis,in order to fuse with GPS-guided data,a coordinate conversion algorithm for cone sleeve/oil receiving plug of unmanned tanker is designed.The linear constrained least squares algorithm is used for data fusion and Simulation of vision and DGPS information.Thirdly,the basic hardware platform and control law software of UAV flight control are designed.On this basis,aiming at the guidance accuracy requirements of different stages of soft aerial refueling of UAV,a long-distance tracking guidance law based on vision/DGPS fusion information and a shortdistance docking guidance law based on vision guidance are designed.Finally,the actual flight test and analysis are carried out on the built UAV soft aerial refueling platform,which verifies the UAV’s automatic takeoff and landing,cruising and retrieving functions of cone sleeve under the guidance of single-point GPS,and realizes the UAV soft aerial refueling flight test based on vision/DGPS guidance.Through data analysis,it can be seen that the docking guidance technology of UAV aerial refueling designed in this paper has good feasibility,and has important reference value for the engineering realization of UAV aerial refueling guidance technology.