This paper presents a novel battery health management system for electric UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) based on a Bayesian inference driven prognostic framework. The aim is to be able to predict the end-ofdischarge (EOD) event that indicates that the battery pack has run out of charge for any given flight of an electric UAV platform. The amount of usable charge of a battery for a given discharge profile is not only dependent on the starting state-of-charge (SOC), but also other factors like battery health and the discharge or load profile imposed. This problem is more pronounced in battery powered electric UAVs since different flight regimes like takeoff/landing and cruise have different power requirements and a dead stick condition (battery shut off in flight) can have catastrophic consequences. Since UAVs deployments are relatively new, there is a lack of statistically significant flight data to motivate data-driven approaches. Consequently, we have developed a detailed discharge model for the batteries used and used it in a Bayesian inference based filtering (Particle Filtering) technique to generate remaining useful life (RUL) distributions for a given discharge. The results section presents the validation of this approach in hardware-in-theloop tests. 12
This paper presents a novel battery health management technology for the new generation of electric unmanned aerial vehicles powered by long-life, high-density, scalable power sources. Current reliability based techniques are insufficient to manage the use of such batteries when they are an active power source with frequently varying loads in uncertain environments. The technique presented here encodes the basic electrochemical processes of a Lithium-polymer battery in an advanced Bayesian inference framework to simultaneously track battery state-of-charge as well as tune the battery model to make accurate predictions of remaining useful life. Results from ground tests with emulated flight profiles are presented with discussions on the use of such prognostics results for decision making.
This paper addresses the problem of building trust in the online prediction of a eUAV’s remaining available flying time powered by lithium-ion polymer batteries. A series of ground tests are described that make use of an electric unmanned aerial vehicle (eUAV) to verify the performance of remaining flying time predictions. The algorithm verification procedure described is implemented on a fully functional vehicle that is restrained to a platform for repeated run-to-functional-failure (charge depletion) experiments. The vehicle under test is commanded to follow a predefined propeller RPM profile in order to create battery demand profiles similar to those expected during flight. The eUAV is repeatedly operated until the charge stored in powertrain batteries falls below a specified limit threshold. The time at which the limit threshold on battery charge is crossed is then used to measure the accuracy of the remaining flying time prediction. In our earlier work battery aging was not included. In this work we take into account aging of the batteries where the parameters were updated to make predictions. Accuracy requirements are considered for an alarm that warns operators when remaining flying time is estimated to fall below the specified limit threshold.
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