Trajectory Optimization for Dynamic Soaring Remotely Piloted Aircraft with Under-Wing Solar Panels

Chang, Josh; Laliberté, Jeremy

doi:10.2514/1.c037105

Cited by 5 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 22 publications

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“…The existing studies mainly focused on high-altitude solar-powered fixed-wing UAVs, divided into two major areas. On the one hand, gravitational potential, wind shear and other methods are used as flight trajectory planning energy resources to reduce the weight of energy storage battery [10][11][12][13][14]. On the other hand, the UAVs increase solar income energy in the normal direction of the wing by adjusting attitude [15][16][17].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

State-of-Charge Trajectory Planning for Low-Altitude Solar-Powered Convertible UAV by Driven Modes

Cao,

Liu

2024

Drones

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The conversion efficiency of solar energy and the capacity of energy storage batteries limit the development of low-altitude solar-powered aircrafts in the face of challenging meteorological phenomena in the lower atmosphere. In this paper, the energy planning problem of solar-power convertible unmanned aerial vehicles (SCUAVs) is studied, and a degressive state-of-charge (SOC) trajectory planning method with energy management strategy (EMS) is proposed. The SOC trajectory planning strategy is divided into four stages driven by three modes, which achieves the energy cycle of SCUAV’s long-endurance cruise and multiple hovers without the need to fully charge the battery SOC. The EMS is applied to control the output of solar cell/battery and power distribution for each stage according to three modes. A prediction model based on wavelet transform (WT), long short-term memory (LSTM) networks and autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA) is proposed for the weather forecast in the low altitude, where solar irradiance is used for the prediction of solar input power, and the wind and its inflow direction take into account the multi-mode power prediction. Numerical and simulation results indicate that the effectiveness of the proposed SOC trajectory planning method has a positive impact on low-altitude solar-powered aircrafts.

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