Mission Planner for Solar Powered Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

• Autor(a) principal: Coelho, Luís Miguel Marques
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.6/8570
• topic: Algoritmo de Otimização; Modelo Solar; Planeamento de Missões; Veículos Aérios Não Tripulados; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Engenharia Aeronáutica

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV’s), initially used for military applications, have become increasingly attractive for civilian purposes. The use of this type of aircraft has grown exponentially in recent years, both for professional and recreational purposes, due to the numerous advantages they present. The increasingly demand of UAV led to an increase in investment, namely in the development of solar powered UAVs. Nowadays, with the arising of this type of UAV’s, the mission planners have to start to be updated with new features considering UAV’s with photovoltaic solar panels. This way, the present work describes the development and validation of a mission planner for solar powered UAV’s, capable of planning and optimizing a mission given a initial guess of waypoints parameters (latitude, longitude, altitude and airspeed), considering real weather forecast and terrain elevation data. For this, the mission planner considers several mathematical models, required for the calculation of the mission performance, and a sequential quadratic programming algorithm to optimize the initial mission. After it describes the theoretical models, a practical application of the mission planner is done in order to verify its performance. Regarding its validation, several results divided by topics of interest are presented and discussed, concluding that the mission planner works efficiently, regarding the mission planning, even though, it has some aspects to be improved.