Abstract
Increasing flight endurance of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is a main issue for many applications of these aircrafts. This paper deals with air to air refueling between UAVs. Relative estimation using only INS/GPS system is not sufficiently accurate to accomplish an autonomous dock for aerial refueling using a boom system in the tanker.
In this paper we propose a quaternion based relative state estimator to fuse GPS and INS sensor data of each UAV with vision pose estimation of the receiver obtained from the tanker. Simulated results validate the approach and are the starting point for ground and flight tests in the next months.
A. Ollero—This work has been supported by Airbus Defence & Space under the project Open Innovation SAVIER and the MarineUAS PROJECT (H2020-ITN-642153).
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Martín, J., Angelina, H., Heredia, G., Ollero, A. (2016). Tanker UAV for Autonomous Aerial Refueling. In: Reis, L., Moreira, A., Lima, P., Montano, L., Muñoz-Martinez, V. (eds) Robot 2015: Second Iberian Robotics Conference. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 417. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27146-0_44
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27146-0_44
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