A survey of vision based autonomous aerial refueling for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are expected to play a similar role to manned aircraft in both military and civilian field. At present, the major shortcoming of UAVs is lack of payload and endurance, which significantly impacts the performance of UAVs in long-time and complex missions. To overcome the shortcoming, the capability of in-flight aerial refueling has become a critical aspect of UAVs. The purpose of this paper is to provide a survey of the vision based techniques which could be applied to autonomous aerial refueling for UAVs, including vision-based navigation and visual servo control. Multi-sensor fusion methods and simulation approaches of autonomous aerial refueling are also discussed.