Abstract
A tether-powered unmanned aerial vehicle is presented in this article to demonstrate the highest altitude and the longest flight time among surveyed literature. The grid-powered ground station transmits high voltage electrical energy through a well-managed conductive tether to a 2-kg hexacopter hovering in the air. Designs, implementations, and theoretical models are discussed in this research work. Experimental results show that the proposed system can operate over 50 m for 4 h continuously. Compared with battery-powered multicopters, tether-powered ones have great advantages on specific-area long-endurance applications, such as precision agriculture, intelligent surveillance, and vehicle-deployed cellular sites.
Highlights
Endurance is a crucial performance index of electrical rotary-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV)
The objective of the functional test is to confirm the whole functionality of the system, rationale of test procedures and gather flight data to verified design parameters
The goal of the endurance test is to prove that the system is capable of “near infinite” air time
Summary
Endurance is a crucial performance index of electrical rotary-wing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). An optimal battery capacity exists to achieve the maximum endurance. Methods of increasing maximum endurance can be found in [7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15]. Methods of increasing maximum endurance include optimizing the design of UAVs according to their applications [8,9,10,11], deposition of empty batteries [6,7], reducing energy loss and cost during operation [12,13], and combining with other energy sources [14,15].
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