In this work, a vision-based Flight Guidance and Navigation System is developed for providing cross-country soaring functionality to a small UAV glider. The overall system is based on existing major contributions to autonomous soaring while still missing components have been designed. A cumulus-cloud mapping algorithm was extended to not only estimate the position of cumuli but also their drift velocity and their updraft strength both factors with a significant impact on cross-country soaring performances. A guidance law was developed to navigate the vehicle during final glide from the last visited cloud to the destination given flight performance, mission and wind constraints. A path planning algorithm is proposed to then guide the vehicle in minimum time to its destination. Simulations were conducted in a nonlinear 6-DOF simulator for a small UAV glider to demonstrate the benefits of the system.


    Access

    Check access

    Check availability in my library

    Order at Subito €


    Export, share and cite



    Title :

    A vision-based Flight Guidance and Navigation System for autonomous cross-country soaring UAVs


    Contributors:


    Publication date :

    2015-06-01


    Size :

    4986663 byte




    Type of media :

    Conference paper


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English




    Autonomous Soaring Flight Results

    M. J. Allen | NTIS | 2006


    Autonomous Soaring Flight Results

    Allen, Michael J. | NTRS | 2006


    Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Approach Towards Autonomous Cross-Country Soaring

    Notter, Stefan / Schimpf, Fabian / Fichter, Walter | AIAA | 2021


    Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning Approach for Autonomous Cross-Country Soaring

    Notter, Stefan / Schimpf, Fabian / Müller, Gregor et al. | AIAA | 2022