On-board visual navigation system for unmanned aerial vehicles autonomous aerial refueling

In this paper, an on-board binocular visual navigation system based on unmanned aerial vehicles platform is designed for autonomous aerial refueling. The hardware configuration of the entire platform is introduced. Vision algorithms including target tracking, feature extraction, and pose estimation are employed for measuring the relation between two unmanned aerial vehicles. Two situations are considered under long and short distances to make this procedure flexible. Four pose estimation algorithms are implemented and compared in this research. A series of experiments are conducted to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of aerial refueling on the unmanned aerial vehicle platform.