Probe control for autonomous aerial refueling based on high order sliding mode

Aiming at the low tracking precision and bad anti-disturbances ability existing in present docking controllers for the receiver in autonomous aerial refueling (AAR) process, this paper proposes a probe controller based on high order sliding mode method. Firstly, in order to improve the tracking precision, the controlled object is transformed from barycenter to probe by using the reference-observer-based tracking controller (ROTC) as the outer loop controller. Furthermore, in order to improve the anti-disturbances ability, the high order sliding mode (HOSM) controllers are designed for angular rates loop and speed loop to reject the main disturbances. The proposed method which uses ROTC as outer probe controller and HOSM as inner angular rate loop and speed loop controller has good tracking performance, anti-disturbances ability and simple structure. Effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by the simulations.