Antidisturbance Vibration Suppression of the Aerial Refueling Hose during the Coupling Process

Abstract EN

In autonomous aerial refueling (AAR), the vibration of the flexible refueling hose caused by the receiver aircraft’s excessive closure speed should be suppressed once it appears.

This paper proposed an active control strategy based on the permanent magnet synchronous motor (PMSM) angular control for the timely and accurate vibration suppression of the flexible refueling hose.

A nonsingular fast terminal sliding-mode (NFTSM) control scheme with adaptive extended state observer (AESO) is proposed for PMSM take-up system under multiple disturbances.

The states and the “total disturbance” of the PMSM system are firstly reconstituted using the AESO under the uncertainties and measurement noise.

Then, a faster sliding variable with tracking error exponential term is proposed together with a special designed reaching law to enhance the global convergence speed and precision of the controller.

The proposed control scheme provides a more comprehensive solution to rapidly suppress the flexible refueling hose vibration in AAR.

Compared to other methods, the scheme can suppress the flexible hose vibration more fleetly and accurately even when the system is exposed to multiple disturbances and measurement noise.

Simulation results show that the proposed scheme is competitive in accuracy, global rapidity, and robustness.