An Automated Battery Management System to Enable Persistent Missions With Multiple Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

This paper presents the development and hardware implementation of an autonomous battery maintenance mechatronic system that significantly extends the operational time of battery powered small-scaled unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). A simultaneous change and charge approach is used to overcome the significant downtime experienced by existing charge-only approaches. The automated system quickly swaps a depleted battery of a UAV with a replenished one while simultaneously recharging several other batteries. This results in a battery maintenance system with low UAV downtime, arbitrarily extensible operation time, and a compact footprint. Hence, the system can enable multiagent UAV missions that require persistent presence. This capability is illustrated by developing and testing in flight a centralized autonomous planning and learning algorithm that incorporates a probabilistic health model dependent on vehicle battery health that is updated during the mission, and replans to improve the performance based on the improved model. Flight test results are presented for a 3-h-long persistent mission with three UAVs that each has an endurance of 8-10 min on a single battery charge (more than 100 battery swaps).Index Terms-Battery management systems, learning (artificial intelligence), Markov processes, multiagent systems, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

Energetics in robotic flight at small scales

“…1 As an alternative, one can consider using devices and methods to both swap and charge batteries [53 -55]. Such approaches can reduce the time a vehicle remains idle and thus increase efficiency and vehicle utilization [55]. Despite these benefits, using docking stations adds another layer of complexity, which may not always be desirable.…”

Minimum-energy path generation for a quadrotor UAV

“…[7] and the references therein). Finally, in [8], [9] automatic battery change/recharge platforms have been developed to enable long-endurance missions for multiple quadrotors.…”

Designing a Softwarized Network Deployed on a Fleet of Drones for Rural Zone Monitoring

“…Therefore, their number, protocols and techniques they apply to setup and maintain connectivity, and the relative routing and battery recharging policies are out of the scope of this paper, and can be considered as a matter of future work. Interested readers can refer to the wide literature regarding FANETs [23][24][25] and data communications in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) [16,48].…”