Autonomous Airborne Refueling of Unmanned Air Vehicles Using the Global Positioning System

Autonomous airborne refueling requires that the position of the receiving aircraft relative to the tanker be known very accurately and in real time. To meet this need, highly precise carrier-phase differential global positioning system solutions are being considered as the basis for navigation. However, the tanker introduces severe sky blockage into the autonomous airborne refueling mission, which reduces the number of visible global positioning system satellites and hence degrades the positioning accuracy. In this paper, we analyze the autonomous airborne refueling navigation problem in detail, define an optimal navigation architecture, and quantify navigation system availability. As part of this work, a high-fidelity dynamic sky-blockage model is developed and used to plan autonomous airborne refueling flight tests. The flight tests were conducted to obtain time-tagged global positioning system and attitude data that were processed offline to validate the blockage model.

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