System and method for aerial refueling

A system for detecting the tube tip and receptacle mouth for an in-flight aerial refueling system with a flying boom, comprising the three following elements:

• A BD element composed of a holder casing attached to the tip of the boom tube, disposing on the surface thereof a set of light-emitting elements which are LEDs, laser emitters or similar and the associated electronics for connection and control thereof;
• A C element formed by a box or casing attached to the outer surface of the tanker aircraft, preferably on the tailcone, with electronics that govern the foregoing set of light emitters and also a pair of 3D vision cameras in charge of detecting the light emitters of the receptacle of the receiver aircraft to obtain the coordinates (X, Y, Z) of the center of each light-emitting point and other points of interest with respect to a common center of coordinates, both cameras being equipped with a narrow bandpass filter, tuned at the wavelength of the light emitters;
• and
• A processing element P of information and calculation,
• wherein each of its 3D cameras is equipped with some (or all) of the following ancillary elements:
• Lenses
• Electronics for elimination of aberrations and dead pixels, image enhancement and
• calculation of coordinates (x, y) of the LEDs of the BD element and of the receptacle, characterized in that the P processing element of information and calculation is composed of:
• either traditional processors, understanding these to be the most conventional, based on micro-programmed logic with a set of instructions, which are executed sequentially, or composed of high-velocity hardware such as FPGAs or GPUs, or those based on artificial neural networks, the latter with parallel processing capacity;
• additionally, the P subsystem is composed of an element of communications with the other subsystems that compose the invention, or of a combination of all the foregoing.