Fault detection for autonomous aerial refueling

Increasing flight endurance of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is a main issue for many applications of these aircrafts. This paper deals with air to air refueling between UAVs. Relative estimation using only INS/GPS system is not sufficiently accurate to accomplish an autonomous dock for aerial refueling. In this paper we propose a relative state estimator to fuse GPS and INS sensor data of each UAV with vision pose estimation of the receiver obtained from the tanker and serves as an introduction to fault detection in autonomous aerial refueling comparing vision and INS measurements. Simulated results validate the fault detection indicator and are the starting point for ground and flight tests in the next months.