Staging energy sources to extend flight time of a multirotor UAV
Karan P. Jain, Jerry Tang, Koushil Sreenath, Mark W. Mueller
Abstract
Energy sources such as batteries do not decrease in mass after consumption, unlike combustion-based fuels. We present the concept of staging energy sources, i.e. consuming energy in stages and ejecting used stages, to progressively reduce the mass of aerial vehicles in-flight which reduces power consumption, and consequently increases flight time. A flight time vs. energy storage mass analysis is presented to show the endurance benefit of staging to multirotors. We consider two specific problems in discrete staging - optimal order of staging given a certain number of energy sources, and optimal partitioning of a given energy storage mass budget into a given number of stages. We then derive results for a continuously staged case of an internal combustion engine driving propellers. Notably, we show that a multirotor powered by internal combustion has an upper limit on achievable flight time independent of the available fuel mass. Lastly, we validate the analysis with flight experiments on a custom two-stage battery-powered quadcopter. This quadcopter can eject a battery stage after consumption in-flight using a custom-designed mechanism, and continue hovering using the next stage. The experimental flight times match well with those predicted from the analysis for our vehicle. We achieve a 19% increase in flight time using the batteries in two stages as compared to a single stage.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{iros2020_stagingenergysou,
title = {Staging energy sources to extend flight time of a multirotor UAV},
author = {Karan P. Jain and Jerry Tang and Koushil Sreenath and Mark W. Mueller},
booktitle = {IROS 2020},
year = {2020}
}