Solar powered unmanned aerial vehicle for continuous flight: Conceptual overview and optimization

Morton, Scott A.; Scharber, Luke; Papanikolopoulos, Nikolaos

doi:10.1109/icra.2013.6630659

Cited by 24 publications

(15 citation statements)

References 14 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Most research has been focusing on conceptual design studies without extensive flight experience, e.g. [6]. Projects that have demonstrated perpetual flight are Cocconi's SoLong [7], which performed a continuous 48-hour flight using solar power while actively seeking out thermal updrafts, and SkySailor [8], which demonstrated a 27-hour solar-powered continuous flight without the use of thermals in 2008.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perpetual flight with a small solar-powered UAV: Flight results, performance analysis and model validation

Oettershagen

Melzer

Mantel

et al. 2016

2016 IEEE Aerospace Conference

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Abstract-This paper presents the design of the small-scale hand-launchable solar-powered AtlantikSolar UAV, summarizes flight results of a continuous 28-hour solar-powered flight that demonstrated AtlantikSolar's capability for energetically perpetual flight, and offers a model-based verification of flight performance and an outlook on the energetic margins that can be provided towards perpetual flight given today's solar-powered UAV technology. AtlantikSolar is a 5.6m-wingspan and 6.9kg mass low-altitude long-endurance UAV that was designed to provide perpetual endurance at a geographic latitude of 45N in a 4-month window centered around June 21st. A specific design emphasis is robust perpetual endurance with respect to local meteorological disturbances (e.g. clouds, winds, downdrafts). Providing the necessary energetic safety margins is a significant challenge on small-scale solar-powered UAVs. This paper thus describes the design optimizations undertaken on the AtlantikSolar UAV for maximum energetic safety margins. In addition, this paper presents the flight test results, analysis and performance verification of AtlantikSolar's first perpetual endurance continuous 28-hour flight. The flight results show a minimum state-of-charge of 40% or excess time of 7 hours during the night. In addition, the charge margin of 5.9 hours indicates sufficiently-fast battery charging during the day. Both margins exceed the performance of previously demonstrated solarpowered LALE UAVs. Another centerpiece of the paper is the verification of these flight results with the theoretical structural-, aerodynamics-and power-models that were developed and used to conceptually design the UAV. The solar-power income model is extended to take into account solar-panel temperature effects, the exact aircraft geometry and the current orientation and is compared against flight results. Finally, the paper provides an analysis and overview into under what conditions and with which energetic margins perpetual flight is possible with today's battery-and solar-cell technology. A perpetual endurance window of up to 6 months around June 21 st is predicted at northern latitudes for the AtlantikSolar UAV configuration without payload. A final outlook into first perpetual endurance applications shows that perpetual flight with miniaturized sensing payloads (small optical and infrared cameras) is possible with a perpetual flight window of 4-5 months.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Perpetual flight with a small solar-powered UAV: Flight results, performance analysis and model validation

Oettershagen

Melzer

Mantel

et al. 2016

2016 IEEE Aerospace Conference

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In this framework, the overloading risk occurs when the optimization problem is infeasible. In other words, the solver is not able to satisfy the constraints (25), (32), and (42) are not satisfied for the zero, perfect, and partial knowledge cases, respectively at least for one of the time slots. Hence,…”

Section: Complexity and Infesability Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Spatial and Temporal Management of Cellular HetNets with Multiple Solar Powered Drones

Alsharoa

Ghazzai

Kadri

et al. 2020

IEEE Trans. on Mobile Comput.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper proposes an energy management framework for cellular heterogeneous networks (HetNets) supported by dynamic solar powered drones. A HetNet composed of a macrocell base station (BS), micro cell BSs, and drone small cell BSs are deployed to serve the networks' subscribers. The drones can land at pre-planned locations defined by the mobile operator and at the macrocell BS site where they can charge their batteries. The objective of the framework is to jointly determine the optimal trips of the drones and the MBSs that can be safely turned off in order to minimize the total energy consumption of the network. This is done while considering the cells' capacities and the minimum receiving power guaranteeing successful communications. To do so, an integer linear programming problem is formulated and optimally solved for three cases based on the knowledge level about future renewable energy statistics of the drones. A low complex relaxed solution is also developed. Its performances are shown to be close to those of the optimal solutions. However, the gap increases as the network becomes more congested. Numerical results investigate the performance of the proposed drone-based approach and show notable improvements in terms of energy saving and network capacity.Index Terms-Drone-based communications, dynamic drone small cells, energy harvesting, energy management, heterogeneous networks.

show abstract

“…This conceptual design methodology is applied in Section below. An alternative conceptual design approach proposed by Morton et al . utilizes a weighted—but to some extent arbitrary—combination of

T_{exc}

and

T_{cm}

.…”

Section: Conceptual Designmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…However, research targeting perpetual endurance in these small‐scale robotic aircraft has been relatively sparse. Most research, for example by Morton, focuses on conceptual design studies without extensive flight experience, for example. Projects that have demonstrated perpetual flight are SoLong , which performed a continuous 48‐hour flight using solar power while actively seeking out thermal updrafts, and SkySailor, which demonstrated a 27‐hour solar‐powered continuous flight without the use of thermals.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Design of small hand‐launched solar‐powered UAVs: From concept study to a multi‐day world endurance record flight

Oettershagen

Melzer

Mantel

et al. 2017

Journal of Field Robotics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

We present the development process behind AtlantikSolar, a small 6.9 kg hand-launchable low-altitude solar-powered Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that recently completed an 81-hour continuous flight and thereby established a new flight endurance world record for all aircraft below 50 kg mass. The goal of our work is to increase the usability of such solarpowered robotic aircraft by maximizing their perpetual flight robustness to meteorological deteriorations such as clouds or winds. We present energetic system models and a design methodology, implement them in our publicly-available conceptual design framework for perpetual flight-capable solar-powered UAVs, and finally apply the framework to the AtlantikSolar UAV. We present the detailed AtlantikSolar characteristics as a practical design example. Airframe, avionics, hardware, state estimation and control method development for autonomous flight operations are described. Flight data is used to validate the conceptual design framework. Flight results from the continuous 81-hour and 2338 km covered ground distance flight show that AtlantikSolar achieves 39 % minimum state-of-charge, 6.8 h excess time and 6.2 h charge margin. These performance metrics are a significant improvement over previous solar-powered UAVs. A performance outlook shows that AtlantikSolar allows perpetual flight in a 6-month window around June 21 st at mid-European latitudes, and that multi-day flights with small optical-or infrared-camera payloads are possible for the first time. The demonstrated performance represents the current state-of-the-art in solarpowered low-altitude perpetual flight performance. We conclude with lessons learned from the three-year AtlantikSolar UAV development process and with a sensitivity analysis that identifies the most promising technological areas for future solar-powered UAV performance improvements.

show abstract

Solar powered unmanned aerial vehicle for continuous flight: Conceptual overview and optimization

Cited by 24 publications

References 14 publications

Perpetual flight with a small solar-powered UAV: Flight results, performance analysis and model validation

Perpetual flight with a small solar-powered UAV: Flight results, performance analysis and model validation

Spatial and Temporal Management of Cellular HetNets with Multiple Solar Powered Drones

Design of small hand‐launched solar‐powered UAVs: From concept study to a multi‐day world endurance record flight

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About