Autonomous Airborne Refueling Demonstration Phase I Flight-Test Results

Guidance and Navigation for UAV Airborne Docking

“…As expected, the state-of-the-art resides within industry, where the most successful effort thus far is the NASA/DARPA Autonomous Airborne Refueling Demonstration project [8]. Although the aircraft were manned, they performed the final stage of docking automatically, using a relative GPS/INS system and a separate vision system to observe the drogue.…”

“…(8) and (9), taking care to only transform the leader by ψ l only, rather than the full attitude. Finally, an ellipse is fit to the marker pixel coordinates using the algorithm in [9].…”

“…In addition to extended range and endurance, fuel savings of 30-40 % have been suggested for haulage flights, through the elimination of refueling stopovers [17]. But despite the clear value, the state-of-the-art in industry is still NASA/DARPA's automated approach to docking with manned aircraft, in 2006 [8], and more recently, close formation with two Global Hawk UAVs in experiments by Northrop Grumman/DARPA [7].…”

An Approach to Mathematical Modeling and Estimation of Probe-Drogue Docking Success Probability for UAV Autonomous Aerial Refueling

“…Note that the decision threshold max sup = (namely, max ≤ ) of the probe-drogue docking maneuver during the aerial refueling deserves further extensive flight tests and comprehensive assessments to determine a reasonable decision threshold. (3) For the probe-drogue docking success probability/rate, a comparison between the theoretical analysis proposed in this paper and the flight test results of NASA AAR demonstration [21] is described as follows, with a detailed introduction of the NASA results and a visualized comparison in Figure 10. Note that the probe-drogue docking success probability is corresponding to the theoretical analysis proposed in this paper, and the probe-drogue docking success rate is corresponding to the flight test results of NASA AAR demonstration [21].…”

“…However, specific research on mathematical modeling and analysis of probe-drogue docking success probability for PDARS has not yet been reported. To the best of our knowledge, only some flight tests show that the docking success probability of the manned aircraft is 30%∼40%, and the NASA UAV 2 International Journal of Aerospace Engineering aerial refueling docking success probability is about 60% [5,17,21]. As mentioned above, the previous research mainly focused on drogue detection and recognition, drogue 3D locating, docking control, bow wave effect analysis, and hose whipping control, while it did not involve the probe-drogue docking success probability estimation, which will be of great guiding significance to the decision making of PDARS in the engineering application of probe-drogue aerial refueling [5].…”