Abstract
This paper presents the functional architecture of a flight endurance enhancement system that is suitable for the operation of battery-powered Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) in maritime and coastal regions. The flight duration problem is subject of various research efforts; different techniques have arisen to address different aspects aiming to prolong the airborne time with minimum resources. This is a great challenge for low-cost platforms that are typically operated with Lithium-Polymer (LiPo) batteries, which have inherent cost and weight restrictions, and also they have not reached sufficient safety and reliability levels to operate in hazardous environments, such as the ocean. This paper depicts the architecture of novel system for flight endurance enhancement. This system is based on Atmospheric Energy Harvesting (AEH) techniques for exploitation of spatial and temporal wind gradients, which is a bio-mimetic principle observed in the flight of albatrosses in the southern ocean. This paper summarizes the high level and low level functional architecture of the proposed modules, including those that have been fully designed, implemented and tested (wind estimation gen1, wind feature identification, communication framework, trajectory generation) and those that are still subject for research, e.g. trajectory tracking and the next generation wind identification system.
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Acknowledgment
This work has been supported by the MarineUAS project (MSCA-ITN-2014-642153), funded by the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 Programme as part of the Marie Sklodowska Curie Actions and by the AEROMAIN project (DPI2014-5983-C2-1-R), funded by the Science and Innovation Ministry of the Spanish Government.
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RodrÃguez, L., Cobano, J.A., Ollero, A. (2018). Architecture of a Flight Endurance Enhancement System for Maritime Operations with Fixed Wing UAS. In: Ollero, A., Sanfeliu, A., Montano, L., Lau, N., Cardeira, C. (eds) ROBOT 2017: Third Iberian Robotics Conference. ROBOT 2017. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 693. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70833-1_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70833-1_15
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