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ACTA AERONAUTICAET ASTRONAUTICA SINICA ›› 2014, Vol. 35 ›› Issue (9): 2375-2389.doi: 10.7527/S1000-6893.2014.0093

• Review • Previous Articles     Next Articles

A Survey of Modeling and Control Technologies for Aerial Refueling System

LU Yuping, YANG Chaoxing, LIU Yangyang   

  1. College of Automation Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, China
  • Received:2013-10-29 Revised:2014-05-06 Online:2014-09-25 Published:2014-05-15
  • Supported by:

    National Natural Science Foundation of China (91016017)

Abstract:

Although aerial refueling has been applied in war for more than half century, research of system modeling and control issues is still a hot area of aeronautical technologies. Based on a large amount of literature, the value and the development history of aerial refueling, advantages and disadvantages of two main refueling methods, and achievements of system modeling and control technologies during the past few years are reviewed. A viewpoint that boom refueling should be developed with the development of tanker aircraft is proposed, considering the advantages that hose-and-drogue refueling does not have. Domestic research on boom refueling and its shortcomings are summarized, and then the necessity and significance of system modeling and control research are discussed. According to the characteristics of boom refueling system, it is proposed that features such as multi-rigid-body, multi-structure, system uncertainty, influence of strong disturbance, influence of elastic oscillation and elastic deformation, should be considered during modeling. Finally, several control problems, such as boom attitude control, boom load alleviation, cooperative control of docking process, suppression of elastic oscillation and development of hardware-in-loop testing platform are discussed.

Key words: aerial refueling, hose-and-drogue refueling, boom refueling, multi-body system, autonomous rendezvous, computer vision, flight control system, cooperative control

CLC Number: