Abstract: In the autonomous aerial refueling mission, a leader-follower strategy based refueling formation flight control method is proposed for the formation flight problem under the hose constraint after the docking of the receiving UAV and the tanker. Firstly, a kinematic/dynamic model of the refueling formation under hose constraint is established. Then, a non-singular terminal sliding mode fast convergence controller is designed to meet the fast convergence requirements of refueling formation under hose constraint. For considering complex airflow disturbances and unknown hose disturb-ances, a trajectory tracking controller for UAV is designed by combining the extended state observer and PI type dy-namic inversion control, and prove that the closed-loop system can achieve fast stabilization in finite time based on Lyapunov stability analysis. Finally, the effectiveness of the designed refueling formation tracking control method is verified by numerical simulation.

Key words: UAV, Autonomous aerial refueling, Formation tracking control, Non-singular sliding mode control, Nonlinear dynamic inversion