Real-Time First Order Guidance Strategies for Trajectory Optimization in UAVs by Utilizing Wind Energy

TL;DR

This paper develops real-time guidance strategies for UAVs to improve flight endurance by utilizing wind measurements, adjusting airspeed and heading to minimize power consumption, validated through extensive simulations.

Contribution

It introduces novel real-time guidance strategies that leverage wind data to optimize UAV energy efficiency, including onboard control and a generic wind field model.

Findings

Strategies significantly reduce power consumption in simulations

Power savings depend on wind conditions and UAV initial heading

Proposed methods outperform the reference steady flight strategy

Abstract

This paper presents real-time guidance strategies for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that can be used to enhance their flight endurance by utilizing {\sl insitu} measurements of wind speeds and wind gradients. In these strategies, periodic adjustments would be made in the airspeed and/or heading angle command for the UAV to minimize a projected power requirement at some future time. In this paper, UAV flights are described by a three-dimensional dynamic point-mass. Onboard closed-loop trajectory tracking logics that follow airspeed vector commands are modeled using the method of feedback linearization. A generic wind field model is assumed that consists of a constant term plus terms that vary sinusoidally with respect to the location. To evaluate the benefits of these strategies in enhancing UAV flight endurance, a reference strategy is introduced in which the UAV would seek to follow the desired airspeed in a steady level flight under zero wind. A performance measure is defined as the average power consumption both over a specified time interval and over different initial heading angles of the UAV. A relative benefit criterion is then defined as the percentage improvement of the performance measure of a proposed strategy over that of the reference strategy. Extensive numerical simulations are conducted. Results demonstrate the benefits and trends of power savings of the proposed real-time guidance strategies.