Research on relative navigation algorithm for UAV Autonomous Aerial Refueling rendezvous phase

The lack of Autonomous Aerial Refueling capability is one of the greatest limitations of UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle). The estimation of the relative position, velocity and attitude is the key issue in this research area. This paper proposes a novel method for relative navigation. We focus on the need for the rendezvous phase. The structure of this paper is as follows. Firstly, we shall briefly introduce the autonomous aerial refueling phases and the related navigation sensors. Then we establish the error equation. After using the Kalman filter, we obtain the estimation of the relative state error. The employed algorithm based on the SINS/GPS/IRST integrated relative navigation, it has advantages of both autonomous navigation and passive target positioning. In simulation experiments, the results show that our algorithm can track the relative state variation and restrain the error divergency effectively.