Advances in Auxiliary Power Unit Development For Dual Supply UAVs

Abstract

This paper address recent developments on auxiliary power unit for dual supply unmanned aerial vehicles. The proposed APU is designed and developed as a scalable backup power solution to tethered UAV systems. The APU addressed in this paper consist of off-line battery power supply and a high speed fault detection and switching unit, to control the proposed APU. Target operation of APU is to switch the battery power whenever the primary cable power is unavailable and switch back to cable power whenever the cable power is available during the UAV flight mission. The switching speed of newly developed prototype in this research with high speed logic ICs and n-channel MOSFETs is proved to be within milliseconds range and therefore could be considered fast enough for low altitude hovering missions. The outcome of the proposed design is also compact and light weighted, hence making the proposed prototype applicable in many existing battery powered UAVs for hybrid use.