Detection and Tracking Strategies for Autonomous Aerial Refuelling Tasks Based on Monocular Vision

Abstract

Detection and tracking strategies based on monocular vision are proposed for autonomous aerial refuelling tasks. The drogue attached to the fuel tanker aircraft has two important features. The grey values of the drogue's inner part are different from the external umbrella ribs, as shown in the image. The shape of the drogue's inner dark part is nearly circular. According to crucial prior knowledge, the rough and fine positioning algorithms are designed to detect the drogue. Particle filter based on the drogue's shape is proposed to track the drogue. A strategy to switch between detection and tracking is proposed to improve the robustness of the algorithms. The inner dark part of the drogue is segmented precisely in the detecting and tracking process and the segmented circular part can be used to measure its spatial position. The experimental results show that the proposed method has good performance in real-time and satisfied robustness and positioning accuracy.

Towards docking safety analysis for unmanned aerial vehicle probe-drogue autonomous aerial refueling based on docking success-probability and docking reachability

“…1–7 Considering the economy and flexibility, much attention has been paid to UAV probe-drogue autonomous aerial refueling (UAV-PD-AAR). 8–24 The docking phase of UAV-PD-AAR will be considered exclusively in this research.…”

A binocular vision-based UAVs autonomous aerial refueling platform

“…Under this circumstance, autonomous aerial refueling (AAR) becomes an important capability for the future employment of UAVs. Vision based sensor and navigation system are widely used in AAR, while experiments are done for both probe-and-drogue refueling system [7][8][9][10] and boom approach [11,12]. To detect the drogue, a set of beacons mounted on the drogue can be supervised by a VisNav sensor [7], and 3D flash lidar is also used for drogue tracking [8].…”

Guidance and Navigation for UAV Airborne Docking

“…Examples in [19,29] tracked a drogue in manned refueling footage using a priori knowledge of the drogue characteristics. Monocular template matching and feature-based methods were demonstrated in [15] using a high-fidelity hardware-in-theloop simulation.…”