Collaborative Control Methods for Automated Air-to-Air Refuelling

Unmanned Air Systems are increasingly prevalent in the defence and civil sectors and there is a desire to increase their eectiveness and versatility by adding the capability to perform air-to-air refuelling. Existing work on automated air-to-air refuelling focuses on leader/follower architectures, which do not fully exploit all available control authority. Developments in active drogue control make this premise equally applicable to probe-drogue and boom-receptacle refuelling. This paper presents a survey of control architectures which may be used to couple systems and improve capture eectiveness or operational envelope, then follows with an initial implementation of two architectures. A virtual structure method is applied to a boom-receptacle system, and a MIMO approach is trialled on a two-aircraft formation.