Flexible Body Dynamics Testing of Air-to-Air Refueling Concepts

Applied research at the intersection of modeling, analysis and experiments pertaining to the automated aerial refueling of an unmanned air system is proposed in this research. Successful implementation of the proposed work leads to the development of an innovative technology that forms the critical automation piece for terminal guidance of the UAS for refueling process. Mathematical modeling and frequency response analysis approaches are used to quantify the spectral content of the vibration response. Analysis results are utilized to evaluate the actuator bandwidths of the flight systems. Various navigation systems that use sensor measurements from GPS-INS system and vision sensors are used to serve as an information front end of the terminal guidance system. Commercial-off-the-shelf embedded computing platforms, and representative sensing systems are utilized to realize prototypes of the proposed technology. In addition to validating the refueling concept and the mechanical and aerodynamic design of the drogue and the probe, the proposed effort provides a systematic approach to integrate the terminal guidance software, and navigation sensor suite and algorithms with the flight-like control systems for representative UAS platforms. The proposed work culminates in a proof-of-concept GNC system that can be integrated further to carryout field testing on-board UAS platforms.