Design and task management of a mobile solar station for charging flying drones

Abstract

This paper provides design and task management of the first stage of a project entitled “Fall-Army Worm (FAW) insect killer”. The project has three main stages: design and energy management stage, flying control of drone stage and detecting and killing FAW stage. The goal of this project is to detect and kill; without chemical methods; a harmful FAW insect which is rapidly spreading in Africa and Asia. This paper focuses on design of the first stage of the system, getting maximum power and controlling the energy of the system. A Photo Voltaic system with energy storage devices is proposed to be the source of power. A new algorithm to control the time scheduling of the killing and detection mission is proposed and its effects on the system’s energy and mission period are studied. A comparison between different methods for tracking the maximum power from PV panels is performed to choose the best (less time and high accuracy) method. The results of simulation indicate the effectiveness of the proposed maximum power tracking and task management system.

A New Battery Selection System and Charging Control of a Movable Solar-Powered Charging Station for Endless Flying Killing Drones

“…To the best of our knowledge, this is the first project combining the three solutions to overcome the three challenges. A new algorithm is proposed to control the start/stop time of the mission while the effects on the system energy and the mission period were studied in our previous work [16]. A new Battery Selection System (BSS) is proposed to achieve the optimal benefit of available solar power in charging the drone's battery, powering the movable power station, and energizing the ABR system.…”