SUAV:Q - a hybrid approach to solar-powered flight

D'Sa, Ruben; Jenson, Devon; Papanikolopoulos, Nikolaos

doi:10.1109/icra.2016.7487501

Cited by 11 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Nevertheless, platforms with a dynamic morphology are by design more adaptable to the environment and potentially more power efficient [81][82][83][84]. For example, to increase flight time, a quadrotor might transform to a fixed-wing aircraft [85]. Due to its flexibility, Agilicious is the ideal tool for the future development of morphable and soft aerial systems.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agilicious: Open-source and open-hardware agile quadrotor for vision-based flight

et al. 2022

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Autonomous, agile quadrotor flight raises fundamental challenges for robotics research in terms of perception, planning, learning, and control. A versatile and standardized platform is needed to accelerate research and let practitioners focus on the core problems. To this end, we present Agilicious, a codesigned hardware and software framework tailored to autonomous, agile quadrotor flight. It is completely open source and open hardware and supports both model-based and neural network–based controllers. Also, it provides high thrust-to-weight and torque-to-inertia ratios for agility, onboard vision sensors, graphics processing unit (GPU)–accelerated compute hardware for real-time perception and neural network inference, a real-time flight controller, and a versatile software stack. In contrast to existing frameworks, Agilicious offers a unique combination of flexible software stack and high-performance hardware. We compare Agilicious with prior works and demonstrate it on different agile tasks, using both model-based and neural network–based controllers. Our demonstrators include trajectory tracking at up to 5 g and 70 kilometers per hour in a motion capture system, and vision-based acrobatic flight and obstacle avoidance in both structured and unstructured environments using solely onboard perception. Last, we demonstrate its use for hardware-in-the-loop simulation in virtual reality environments. Because of its versatility, we believe that Agilicious supports the next generation of scientific and industrial quadrotor research.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Agilicious: Open-source and open-hardware agile quadrotor for vision-based flight

et al. 2022

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“…45 If power requirements for flight are either met or exceeded, then endless flight time should be possible, assuming there are no other hardware restrictions. There are already a number of examples of the usage of energy harvesting and storage in fixed wing aircraft systems in the research community, 44,[46][47][48][49][50] including harvesting of vibrational energy and solar energy and integration of battery systems into the wing designs of unmanned systems. There are a number of commercial and government agency platforms, which use solar cells to gather solar energy and company initiatives to utilize solar energy to provide longer flight times.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A design framework for realizing multifunctional wings for flapping wing air vehicles using solar cells

Holness

Solheim

Bruck

et al. 2019

International Journal of Micro Air Vehicles

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Long flight durations are highly desirable to expand mission capabilities for unmanned air systems and autonomous applications in particular. Flapping wing aerial vehicles are unmanned air system platforms offering several performance advantages over fixed wing and rotorcraft platforms, but are unable to reach comparable flight times when powered by batteries. One solution to this problem has been to integrate energy harvesting technologies in components, such as wings. To this end, a framework for designing flapping wing aerial vehicle using multifunctional wings using solar cells is described. This framework consists of: (1) modeling solar energy harvesting while flying, (2) determining the number of solar cells that meet flight power requirements, and (3) determining appropriate locations to accommodate the desired number of solar cells. A system model for flapping flight was also developed to predict payload capacity for carrying batteries to provide energy only for power spikes and to enable time-to-land safely in an area where batteries can recharge when the sun sets. The design framework was applied to a case study using flexible high-efficiency (>24%) solar cells on a flapping wing aerial vehicle platform, known as Robo Raven IIIv5, with the caveat that a powertrain with 81% efficiency is used in place of the current servos. A key finding was the fraction of solar flux incident on the wings during flapping was 0.63 at the lowest solar altitude. Using a 1.25 safety factor, the lowest value for the purposes of design will be 0.51. Wind tunnel measurements and aerodynamic modeling of the platform determined integrating solar cells in the wings resulted in a loss of thrust and greater drag, but the resulting payload capacity was unaffected because of a higher lift coefficient. A time-to-land of 2500 s was predicted, and the flight capability of the platform was validated in a netted test facility.

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Photovoltaic, thermoelectric and electromagnetic generation technologies applied in power systems for mobile unmanned systems

Ding

Wang

Xian

et al. 2023

Sci. China Technol. Sci.

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SUAV:Q - a hybrid approach to solar-powered flight

Cited by 11 publications

References 8 publications

Agilicious: Open-source and open-hardware agile quadrotor for vision-based flight

Agilicious: Open-source and open-hardware agile quadrotor for vision-based flight

A design framework for realizing multifunctional wings for flapping wing air vehicles using solar cells

Photovoltaic, thermoelectric and electromagnetic generation technologies applied in power systems for mobile unmanned systems

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