Vision-based Estimation of Relative Pose in Autonomous Aerial Refueling

The lack of autonomous aerial refueling capabilities is one of the greatest limitations of unmanned aerial vehicles. This paper discusses the vision-based estimation of the relative pose of a tanker and unmanned aerial vehicle, which is a key issue in autonomous aerial refueling. The main task of this paper is to study the relative pose estimation for a tanker and unmanned aerial vehicle in the phase of commencing refueling and during refueling. The employed algorithm includes the initialization of the orientation parameters and an orthogonal iteration algorithm to estimate the optimal solution of rotation matrix and translation vector. In simulation experiments, because of the small variation in the rotation angle in aerial refueling, the method in which the initial rotation matrix is the identity matrix is found to be the most stable and accurate among methods. Finally, the paper discusses the effects of the number and configuration of feature points on the accuracy of the estimation results when using this method.