Autonomous Aerial Refueling of Multiple UAVs: An Efficient Rendezvous Scheduling Approach

Autonomous aerial refueling (AAR) is an important capability for the future successful deployment and operation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), so it is necessary to design an efficient rendezvous scheduling approach. In this paper, a general strategy for refueling missions is proposed for intensive refueling firstly, and then the tanker flight path and virtual queue sequence points are designed. Secondly, to obtain the optimal refueling time under the strategy, an integer linear programming (ILP) algorithm based on the branch-and-bound method is proposed, and some planning is further made for the waiting queue adjustment. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by simulation via two indexes, namely, the minimum oil volume and average volume of the receivers at the start of the refueling.