Design of flying boom controller before and after docking

An increasing interest over the last decades in developing aerial boom refueling technology has prompted research into controller design of flying boom. During air-to-air refueling, there are two task for flying boom controller divided by docking respectively: attitude control and unloading control. Under some assumptions, the dynamic models before and after docking are built. Based on the dynamic model before docking, the sliding mode disturbance observer based back-stepping adaptive controller is used in attitude control after dividing the dynamic model into two subsystems. Then, the unloading controller is designed to eliminate the radial constraint force. After designing, the asymptotical stability of unload controller is proved by Barbalat's lemma. The effectiveness and adaptability is shown in the results of simulations with complex circumstance of flying boom.