Docking control of autonomous aerial refueling for UAV based on LQR

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) has many advantages, such as miniature, light weight, low cost, excellent and maneuverability and so on, which make it get more and more attention from the military of many countries. A critical limitation for the current use of UAV is their limited range. This paper describes the results of an effort on the modeling of the UAV aerial refueling problem and on how to realize the docking procedure accurately without considering wake effects and natural oscillation of the probe-drogue refueling system. Desirable performances are achieved by the LQR-based control laws for the docking of the UAV to the probe-drogue refueling system. By using the simulation platform of Matlab/Simulink, the simulation results of the tracks of probe and drogue in the docking phrase of aerial refueling are verified. This simulations reveal that the design of the full state feedback controller can realize docking between the tanker and the unmanned aerial vehicle fast and smoothly.