Control of an airborne tethered kite for energy production

Airborne wind energy is rapidly becoming an area of intense research. Wind turbines are the dominant form of wind power today, despite having serious short- comings in terms of cost, infrastructure requirements, and having reached a plateau of technological development. Wind can also be harvested by airborne systems such as kites, which have greater technical challenges (control) but may also overcome the limitations of traditional technology. We propose a low altitude (≈ 100 metres or less) airborne energy harvesting method, such that energy harvesting does not use the well-established pumping cycle, but rather the cyclic lateral motion of a kite. This method is designed for use on a small scale, portable system that can use mass produced kite-surfing kites. The existing FreeKiteSim project is used to simulate the system dynamics of a kite power system, and a kite trajectory controller developed that can initialise a power harvesting trajectory and maintain stable flight. A layered controller design results in a simple PD controller correcting kite heading towards the desired trajectory. We discuss concepts for the production of power in the low altitude regime. Simulation results show that the controller is successful for sustained flight along an energy harvesting trajectory.

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