Steady fuel transfer control of receiving aircraft considering time-varying inertia moment and environmental disturbance

To address the issue of sustained attitude stability during the fuel transfer phase of aerial refueling, considering the impacts of time-varying rotational inertia and environmental disturbances, a rapid robust control method for the receiving aircraft is proposed. This method ensures quick convergence of the control system after disturbances. For the attitude dynamics model of the receiving aircraft, uncertainties such as fuel input, tanker wake, and atmospheric turbulence are introduced to establish a time-varying rotational inertia attitude model oriented towards control. Considering the control objective of maintaining long-term attitude stability of the receiving aircraft, an error robust integral technique is employed to establish a fast-converging control law, enhancing the system's robustness against uncertainties and external disturbances, ensuring the smooth completion of the fuel transfer task. The stability of the closed-loop system is analyzed based on Lyapunov theory, proving the boundedness of the tracking error signal. The digital simulation results of the comparison of three control algorithms show that under the influence of external disturbances such as atmospheric gusts, turbulence, and tanker wake, the proposed robust control method can ensure that the attitude system of the receiving aircraft with dynamic uncertainty and time-varying moment of inertia converges quickly to the equilibrium position after being disturbed, effectively improving the stability of the fuel transfer process.