A guidance law for UAV autonomous aerial refueling based on the iterative computation method

The rendezvous and formation problem is a significant part for the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) autonomous aerial refueling (AAR) technique. It can be divided into two major phases: the long-range guidance phase and the formation phase. In this paper, an iterative computation guidance law (ICGL) is proposed to compute a series of state variables to get the solution of a control variable for a UAV conducting rendezvous with a tanker in AAR. The proposed method can make the control variable converge to zero when the tanker and the UAV receiver come to a formation flight eventually. For the long-range guidance phase, the ICGL divides it into two sub-phases: the correction sub-phase and the guidance sub-phase. The two sub-phases share the same iterative process. As for the formation phase, a velocity coordinate system is created by which control accelerations are designed to make the speed of the UAV consistent with that of the tanker. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed ICGL is effective and robust against wind disturbance. (C) 2014 Production and hosting by Elsevier Ltd. on behalf of CSAA & BUAA.