Abstract
Increasing endurance is a major challenge for battery-powered aerial vehicles. A method is presented which makes use of an updraft around obstacles to decrease the power consumption of a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle. A soaring flight controller has been developed that can autonomously soar while the unmanned aerial vehicle keeps its relative position to that of a moving object. Multiple simulations have been performed to analyse the limitations of the soaring controller under different conditions. The effect of a change in wind velocity and updraft has been analysed. The simulations showed that an increase in updraft decreases the energy consumption of the flight controller. An increase in wind velocity results in a higher updraft requirement, while a decrease in the wind velocity requires less updraft. The simulations achieved sustained flight at 0% throttle. The controller has been validated experimentally using the updraft generated by a moving ship. The practical, autonomous tests reduced the average throttle down to 4.5% in front of a ship. The method presented in this study achieved successful hovering flight using an energy control module for longitudinal positioning.
Highlights
While the usage of autonomously flying vehicles is increasing, and people are getting more confident with new technologies, a shift towards sustainable energy is noticeable
This paper contributes to the development of a novel control method for autonomous and throttle-less soaring in front of a moving obstacle. By performing both simulations and practical tests, this paper aims to investigate whether indefinite, autonomous soaring in front of a moving obstacle is possible and how to presented flight controller reacts under different wind conditions
This resulted in the unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) either crashing into the sea or the safety pilot taking over control
Summary
While the usage of autonomously flying vehicles is increasing, and people are getting more confident with new technologies, a shift towards sustainable energy is noticeable. It will not be possible in the future to design everything on fossil fuels, and either regulations or restrictions are appearing, which hinder the development of wasteful energies or support the use of sustainable products. Battery efficiency is continuously improving, engineers are required to come up with alternative technologies to overcome this barrier. One of these is soaring: a technique that extracts energy from the wind. The demand for wind energy is increasing, and new technologies can increase efficiency significantly
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