A nonlinear adaptive controller for airborne wind energy systems

Abstract

Abstract-A nonlinear adaptive path following controller for a kite based airborne wind energy system is presented. For a given desired geometric path, we provide necessary conditions for closed-loop convergence of the kite to a tube centered around the desired path. The proposed controller is adapts for the case of unknown wind vector and kite parameters. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated via numerical simulations for multiple desired shapes of the geometric path and for varying desired tether length references.

Electricity in the air: Insights from two decades of advanced control research and experimental flight testing of airborne wind energy systems

“…Different guidance strategies for dealing with time-varying uncertainties have been derived, e.g. in Ahbe, Wood, and Smith (2018), Diwale, Alessandretti, Lymperopoulos, and Jones (2016), . In Wood, Ahbe, et al ( 2017), Wood et al (2018) and Rontsis, Costello, Lymperopoulos, and Jones (2015), path following control approaches with compensation for actuation delay were introduced.…”

PolyMPC: An efficient and extensible tool for real‐time nonlinear model predictive tracking and path following for fast mechatronic systems

“…The control signal u γ is the rate of change of the heading angle. A more detailed description of the kite mathematical model can be found in the work of Diwale et al The kite kinematics is given by the following system of ODEs: where , R NK , and R GN are the following rotation matrices: …”

“…The control signal u is the rate of change of the heading angle. A more detailed description of the kite mathematical model can be found in the work of Diwale et al 21 The kite kinematics is given by the following system of ODEs:…”