In this paper, a new design of a helium-assisted hybrid drone is proposed for flight time enhancement. As is widely known, most of the drones with a VTOL (vertical take-off and landing) feature have a short operation time, limiting their capability to carry out sustainable operations for the given missions. Thus, with the clear goal of enhancing the flight time, this study aims to develop a hybrid drone system, where a helium balloon is used to provide a lifting force for this purpose. The proposed design for the hybrid drone has several benefits including easiness to manufacture and relatively small size when compared to other types of hybrid drones. Various analyses are conducted for the design of the hybrid drone system including the balloon shape and size, buoyant force, flight time, and connector design. Since stability and performance are one of the most important issues for the new design, the pole location analysis is conducted based on the control theory. This rigorous analysis provides that the proposed hybrid drone design is stable as well as robust against swinging motions. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed design and flight time enhancement, simulations were conducted and experimental results are also provided using the manufactured hybrid drone system. Through the real experiments, it is proved that the hybrid drone can increase the flight time more than 2.5 times while guaranteeing stable motions.

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This paper addresses an energy-balanced leader-switching policy for formation rotation control of multi-agent systems inspired by bird flocks. Birds that flock in V-formation with a leader rotation strategy are able to travel longer distances due to reduced drag and therefore less energy expenditure. This flocking behavior with a leader rotation will result in more conservation of overall energy and will be particularly beneficial to migrating birds that should fly long distances without landing. In this paper, we propose an energy-balanced leader-switching policy inspired by this bird flocking behavior in order to increase the flight range for multi-agent systems. The formation control of multi-agent systems is achieved by the consensus algorithm, which is fully decentralized through the use of information exchanges between agents. The proposed leader-switching method is not necessarily incorporated with the consensus dynamics and thus, the leader-switching algorithm can be decoupled from formation control dynamics. Therefore, the proposed method can simplify the leader-switching algorithm, making it easy to implement. Moreover, we propose the analytic flight distance based on the energy consumption model for each agent. To test the validity of the developed method, several simulation results are presented.

In this study, a new design of a helium-assisted hybrid drone is proposed for flight time enhancement. As is widely known, most of the drones with a Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) feature have a short operation time, limiting their capability to carry out sustainable operations for the given missions. Thus, with the clear goal of enhancing flight time, this study aims to develop a hybrid drone system, where a helium balloon is used to provide a lifting force for this purpose. The proposed design for the hybrid drone has several benefits including easiness to manufacture and relatively small size when compared to other types of hybrid drones. Various analyses are conducted for the design of the hybrid drone system including the balloon shape and size, buoyant force, flight time, and connector design. Since stability and performance are one of the most important issues for the new design, the pole location analysis is conducted based on the control theory. This rigorous analysis provides that the proposed hybrid drone design is stable as well as robust against swinging motions. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed design and flight time enhancement, simulations were conducted and indoor experimental results are also provided using the manufactured hybrid drone system. Through real experiments, it is proved that the hybrid drone can increase the flight time by more than 2.5 times while guaranteeing stable motions.

In this study, a new design of a helium-assisted hybrid drone is proposed for flight time enhancement. As is widely known, most of the drones with a Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) feature have a short operation time, limiting their capability to carry out sustainable operations for the given missions. Thus, with the clear goal of enhancing flight time, this study aims to develop a hybrid drone system, where a helium balloon is used to provide a lifting force for this purpose. The proposed design for the hybrid drone has several benefits including easiness to manufacture and relatively small size when compared to other types of hybrid drones. Various analyses are conducted for the design of the hybrid drone system including the balloon shape and size, buoyant force, flight time, and connector design. Since stability and performance are one of the most important issues for the new design, the pole location analysis is conducted based on the control theory. This rigorous analysis provides that the proposed hybrid drone design is stable as well as robust against swinging motions. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed design and flight time enhancement, simulations were conducted and indoor experimental results are also provided using the manufactured hybrid drone system. Through real experiments, it is proved that the hybrid drone can increase the flight time by more than 2.5 times while guaranteeing stable motions.