A solar-powered hand-launchable UAV for low-altitude multi-day continuous flight
Philipp Oettershagen, Amir Melzer, Thomas Mantel, Konrad Rudin, Rainer Lotz, Dieter Siebenmann, Stefan Leutenegger, Kostas Alexis
Abstract
This paper presents the conceptual design, detailed development and flight testing of AtlantikSolar, a 5.6m-wingspan solar-powered Low-Altitude Long-Endurance (LALE) Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) designed and built at ETH Zurich. The UAV is required to provide perpetual endurance at a geographic latitude of 45°N in a 4-month window centered around June 21st. An improved conceptual design method is presented and applied to maximize the perpetual flight robustness with respect to local meteorological disturbances such as clouds or winds. Airframe, avionics hardware, state estimation and control method development for autonomous flight operations are described. Flight test results include a 12-hour flight relying solely on batteries to replicate night-flight conditions. In addition, we present flight results from Search-And-Rescue field trials where a camera and processing pod were mounted on the aircraft to create high-fidelity 3D-maps of a simulated disaster area.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{icra2015_asolarpoweredhan,
title = {A solar-powered hand-launchable UAV for low-altitude multi-day continuous flight},
author = {Philipp Oettershagen and Amir Melzer and Thomas Mantel and Konrad Rudin and Rainer Lotz and Dieter Siebenmann and Stefan Leutenegger and Kostas Alexis and Roland Siegwart},
booktitle = {ICRA 2015},
year = {2015}
}