Smooth trajectory generation for wind field exploitation with a small UAS

This paper proposes a solution to generate energy-efficient trajectories for small fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) to harvest energy available from the surrounding wind mass. The process of generating such trajectories consists of the identification of the wind field and the different wind features such as gusts and/or wind shear in order to generate on a waypoint-to-waypoint basis trajectories that increase the efficiency. The paper presents a method to generate smooth trajectories that prioritize the wind energy harvesting for different cases of wind fields. The algorithm for curve generation is a tridiagonal system of linear equations with slope unitary vector, tension and velocity function parameters in order to determine the spline direction at each node. The unitary direction is adjusted for each node to harvest wind energy and also the tension parameters can be determined to adjust the curvature and its rate of change, so that they can be aligned with the dynamic specification of the UAS. Simulations and results are presented in order to demonstrate the performance of the proposed methods showing dramatic airspeed gains for cases in which the wind vector is considered as an input of the curve parametrization.

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