Relative Navigation for Autonomous Aerial Refueling Using Infra-red based Vision Systems

In this paper, a vision-based relative navigation system is addressed for autonomous aerial refueling. In the air-to-air refueling, it is assumed that the tanker has the drogue, and the receiver has the probe. To obtain the relative information from the drogue, a vision-based imaging technology by infra-red camera is applied. In this process, the relative information is obtained by using Gaussian Least Squares Differential Correction (GLSDC), and Levenberg-Marquadt(LM), where the drouge geometric information calculated through image processing is used. These two approaches proposed in this paper are analyzed through numerical simulations.