Particle Swarm-Optimised PID Control of a Receiver Aircraft During Aerial Refuelling

In this paper, a particie swarm-optimised proportional-integral-derivative controller was developed to address the automated aerial refuelling problem for unmanned aerial vehicles. The nonlinear system model was not linearised and was directly used in the quadratic cost function to optimise the controller performance. The developed controller met all performance specifications and a single set of optimised control gains was able to be applied to the system over the complete duration of the defined aerial refuelling manoeuvre.