Abstract: Based on the analysis of the Autonomous Aerial Refueling (AAR) technology, a Flash LIDAR-based AAR scheme was proposed. This scheme can reduce or eliminate the dependence on GPS for AAR. First, according to the flight formation characteristics of the tanker and receiver aircraft, the horizontal and vertical tail of the tanker was selected as the characteristic plane, and a feature extraction algorithm for the tanker's point cloud subset was worked out. Second, Lagrange multiplier method was employed to calculate the unit normal vector of the best fitting characteristic-plane. The unit normal vectors of the successive point cloud frames were available data for visual odometry to estimate the relative pose change between the tanker and receiver aircraft. Simulations show that the feature extraction and pose estimation algorithm is feasible. Finally, in order to improve the accuracy of relative pose estimation of visual odometry, vector median filtering, horizontal and vertical tail correlation algorithm were employed to eliminate measurement errors. Results show that the filter algorithm is feasible in the condition of white noise SNR 25 dB.

Key words: aircraft control and navigation technology, autonomous aerial refueling(AAR), 3D flash light detection and ranging(LIDAR), feature extraction, visual odometry, pose estimation