An Efficient Drogue Detection Algorithm for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Autonomous Refueling Docking Phase

Autonomous aerial refueling technology can significantly extend the operational endurance of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), enhancing their ability to perform long-duration missions efficiently. In this paper, we address the identification of refueling drogues in the close docking phase of autonomous aerial refueling. We propose a high-precision real-time drogue recognition network called DREP-Net. The backbone of this network employs the DGST module for efficient feature extraction and improved representation of multi-scale information. For occlusion and complex background problems, we designed the RGConv module, which combines the re-parameterization module with the GhostNet idea to improve the detection of an occluded drogue. Meanwhile, we introduced the efficient local attention mechanism into the neck network to enhance the overall attention to the target region. Then, we designed Phead, a lightweight detection head that combines the advantages of decoupling and coupling heads to improve the detection speed. Finally, we compared our network with mainstream algorithms on a real drogue dataset, and the results show that DREP-Net has 2.7% higher mean average precision (mAP) compared to the YOLOv8n model, and the detection speed is improved by 31.4 frames per second.