A guidance law for UAV autonomous aerial refueling based on the iterative computation method

Abstract

The rendezvous and formation problem is a significant part for the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) autonomous aerial refueling (AAR) technique. It can be divided into two major phases: the long-range guidance phase and the formation phase. In this paper, an iterative computation guidance law (ICGL) is proposed to compute a series of state variables to get the solution of a control variable for a UAV conducting rendezvous with a tanker in AAR. The proposed method can make the control variable converge to zero when the tanker and the UAV receiver come to a formation flight eventually. For the long-range guidance phase, the ICGL divides it into two sub-phases: the correction sub-phase and the guidance sub-phase. The two sub-phases share the same iterative process. As for the formation phase, a velocity coordinate system is created by which control accelerations are designed to make the speed of the UAV consistent with that of the tanker. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed ICGL is effective and robust against wind disturbance.

Predictive compensation based quantization iterative learning control for nonlinear nonaffine discrete‐time systems

“…The function curve of the uniform quantizer (3) where v denotes the data to be quantized. Note that the real-valued signal v can be transformed into a matching piecewise constant signal.…”

Analysis of rendezvous guidance laws for autonomous aerial refueling for non-maneuvering and identical speed targets

“…Remarkably, it characterised the performance of the rendezvous guidance according to the relative geometry from the target, where the rendezvous is well behaved when the UAV approaches from the side of the target. Meanwhile, considerable studies for the rendezvous guidance problem have been based on the proportional navigation guidance (PNG) [21,22,23] and pure pursuit guidance (PPG) [24,25,26,27,2,28,29,30,31,32,33,34].…”

Nonlinear rendezvous guidance law design for a receiver UAV based on the Lyapunov stability theory

“…Xu and Luo [2] analyzed the rendezvous strategy, and then proposed a nonlinear lateral trajectory tracking guidance law to generate the UAV's lateral acceleration command. Luo et al [3] proposed an iterative computation guidance law to compute a series of state variables for a UAV rendezvousing with a tanker. Qu et al [4] developed a guidance law based on fractional-order sliding mode control to deal with the terminal angle and velocity constraints of a UAV in the rendezvous process.…”