Probe motion compound control for autonomous aerial refueling docking

This paper proposed a probe motion compound control scheme for the receiver docking control in the autonomous aerial refueling (AAR). The dynamic equation of the probe is modeled based on the receiver's 6 DOF nonlinear model which considers the influence of the multiple flow disturbance, and these dynamic equations are transformed into the affine nonlinear form for convenient control design. The AAR docking flight controller is divided into several cascade subsystems via back-stepping design technique. The terms which are independent of the virtual control variables in each affine nonlinear subsystem are taken as the “lumped disturbance”, and are accurately estimated for the disturbance compensation in the designed flight controller, by a group of extended states observers (ESO). Then a compound control scheme, which is constituted by back-stepping and ESO, is proposed for AAR docking based on these established receiver dynamics affine nonlinear form and the estimated lumped disturbances by ESOs. In the proposed probe compound scheme, the probe motion is controlled not only via the translational motion of the barycenter but also via the rotational motion of the receiver. The stability of the proposed probe compound control closed-loop system is formally proved by using Lyapunov function technique. Extensive simulations are carried out to verify the effectiveness and improvement with the proposed controller.