Cooperative docking guidance and control with application to civil autonomous aerial refueling

A novel cooperative guidance approach is applied to the docking maneuver of civil aerial refueling. As opposed to conventional aerial refueling, it is assumed that the tanker aircraft and an aerial refueling boom fixed thereon are controlled in an integrated manner while the receiver aircraft behaves passively. For that, a guidance law is utilized that provides translational boom pivot point accelerations and boom rotational accelerations as inputs for dedicated inner-loop controllers of the tanker aircraft and the boom. The challenging task of generating accelerations of the far from the center of gravity located boom pivot point is addressed using direct lift control. The ability to achieve successful docking is demonstrated using numerical simulations.