Review of Sensor Technology to Support Automated Air-to-Air Refueling of a Probe Configured Uncrewed Aircraft

Abstract

As technologies advance and applications for uncrewed aircraft increase, the capability to conduct automated air-to-air refueling becomes increasingly important. This paper provides a review of required sensors to enable automated air-to-air refueling for an uncrewed aircraft, as well as a review of published research on the topic. Automated air-to-air refueling of uncrewed aircraft eliminates the need for ground infrastructure for intermediate refueling, as well as the need for on-site personnel. Automated air-to-air refueling potentially supports civilian applications such as weather monitoring, surveillance for wildfires, search and rescue, and emergency response, especially when airfields are not available due to natural disasters. For military applications, to enable the Air Wing of the Future to strike at the ranges required for the mission, both crewed and uncrewed aircraft must be capable of air-to-air refueling. To cover the sensors required to complete automated air-to-air refueling, a brief history of air-to-air refueling is presented, followed by a concept of employment for uncrewed aircraft refueling, and finally, a review of the sensors required to complete the different phases of automated air-to-air refueling. To complete uncrewed aircraft refueling, the uncrewed receiver aircraft must have the sensors required to establish communication, determine relative position, decrease separation to astern position, transition to computer vision, position keep during refueling, and separate from the tanker aircraft upon completion of refueling. This paper provides a review of the twelve sensors that would enable the uncrewed aircraft to complete the seven tasks required for automated air-to-air refueling.

A critical review of energy consumption and optimization strategies in the Nigerian aviation sector: challenges and prospects

“…Firstly, the sheer act of transporting vast quantities of fuel across the airport uses substantial energy. Secondly, given the emissions associated with diesel combustion, they contribute significantly to the airport's overall carbon footprint (Li and Zhang 2023;Mangold et al 2022;Parry and Hubbard 2023). Furthermore, consider the auxiliary power needs of an aircraft during its layover.…”

Research of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Autonomous Aerial Refueling Docking Method Based on Binocular Vision

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“…This improves the scale adaptation and real-time performance of the object detection network and successfully realizes the feature extraction and matching of the drogue. (2) We propose a binocular vision-based drogue pose estimation method for the UAV-AAR vision navigation problem, which can effectively complete drogue pose estimation and provide accurate navigation information. In addition, a visual reprojectionbased pose optimization method is proposed, which can further improve the accuracy and robustness of the drogue pose estimation algorithm by using more feature points.…”

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