A novel autonomous aerial refueling drogue detection and pose estimation method based on monocular vision

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel drogue measurement method based on monocular vision for autonomous aerial refueling task in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Firstly, to solve the problem of detecting the drogue without artificial features, an arc-level drogue detection and recognition algorithm is proposed. Secondly, a pose estimation algorithm based on the structural features of the drogue is proposed measuring the pose of the drogue’s 3D space. Finally, the proposed method is proved to be valid according to the real air refueling task data set, ground acquisition data, and simulation experiments.