Flight Control and Simulation for Aerial Refueling

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of controlling the receiver aircraft to achieve a successful aerial refueling. For the performance verification of the controller, a new set of nonlinear, 6-DOF, rigid body equations of motion for the receiver aircraft has been derived. The equations are developed using the reference frame as one that is attached to, translates and rotates with the tanker aircraft. Furthermore, the nonlinear equations contain the wind effect terms and their time derivatives to represent the aerodynamic coupling involved between the two aircraft. These wind terms are obtained using an averaging technique that computes the effective induced wind components and wind gradients in the receiver aircraft's body frame. Dynamics of the engine and the actuators are also included in the study. A linear position-tracking controller has been designed using a combination of integral control and optimal LQR design. The controller does not use the information of the tanker's vortex induced wind effects acting on the receiver aircraft as well as the mass change that occurs during refueling. The performance of the controller is evaluated in the high fidelity simulation environment employing the new sets of equations of motion. The simulation and control design are applied to a tailless fighter aircraft with innovative control effectors and thrust vectoring capability. Various allocation schemes for redundant control variables are analyzed in a realistic approach maneuver to the refueling contact position behind the tanker aircraft. In this paper, the performance evaluation is presented only during the initial phase of aerial refueling maneuver when the receiver aircraft maneuvers to reach the refueling contact position.

Autonomous Close Formation Flight Control with Fixed Wing and Quadrotor Test Beds

“…The controller performance is given a score as a comprehensive comparison against ideal behavior. The score is formulated in the performance index (23). The lateral, forward, and vertical controllers are all scored individually since they are all …”

“…Compensation-type controllers [16][17][18][19][20][21], optimal 2 International Journal of Aerospace Engineering control [22][23][24][25], adaptive control [26,27], robust control [28], feedback linearization [27,[29][30][31], and behavioral [32] approaches have all been developed for formation flight applications for fixed wing aircraft and quadrotors.…”

Derivation of the Dynamics Equations of Receiver Aircraft in Aerial Refueling

“…In this work, the equations of motion are derived in terms of relative position and orientation. A benefit of this approach is that the motion of the tanker aircraft is explicitly formulated as disturbance on the relative motion of the receiver aircraft [27,28].…”

Autonomous Formation Flight: Design and Experiments

“…Since then, a variety of control techniques has been evaluated includeing optimal control (McCammish et al 1996) (Dogan et al 2005), adaptive control (Boskovic & Mehra 2003), fuzzy control (Li et al 2005), robust control (Li et al 2006), feedback linearization ) (Venkataramanan & Dogan 2003), and sliding mode . performed a string stability analysis of an autonomous formation for measuring of how position errors propagate from one vehicle to another in a cascaded system.…”