Related papers: Seabird trajectories map onto a reduced optimal-co…
Airborne wind energy systems are capable of extracting energy from higher wind speeds at higher altitudes. The configuration considered in this paper is based on a tethered kite flown in a pumping orbit. This pumping cycle generates energy…
Flying birds navigate effectively through crosswinds, even when wind speeds are as high as flight speeds. What information birds use to sense crosswinds and compensate is largely unknown. We found that lovebirds can navigate 45-degree…
This paper presents a novel algorithm to plan energy-efficient trajectories for autonomous ornithopters. In general, trajectory optimization is quite a relevant problem for practical applications with \emph{Unmanned Aerial Vehicles} (UAVs).…
Biological flapping wing fliers operate efficiently and robustly in a wide range of flight conditions and are a great source of inspiration to engineers. The unsteady aerodynamics of flapping-wings are dominated by large-scale vortical…
A new dynamic control algorithm in order to direct the trajectory of a glider to a pre-assigned target point is proposed. The algorithms runs iteratively and the approach to the target point is self-correcting. The algorithm is applicable…
Sailboat path-planning is a natural hybrid control problem (due to continuous steering and occasional "tack-switching" maneuvers), with the actual path-to-target greatly affected by stochastically evolving wind conditions. Previous studies…
Lagrangian ocean drifters provide highly accurate approximations of ocean surface currents but are sparsely located across the globe. As drifters passively follow ocean currents, there is minimal control on where they will be making…
A control design approach to achieve fully autonomous take-off and flight maneuvers with a tethered aircraft is presented and demonstrated in real-world flight tests with a small-scale prototype. A ground station equipped with a controlled…
A technique by which a spacecraft can interact with flows of ionized gas in space (the solar wind or interstellar medium) to be accelerated to velocities greater than the wind velocity is explored. Inspired by the dynamic soaring maneuvers…
This paper presents a data-driven optimal control policy for a micro flapping wing unmanned aerial vehicle. First, a set of optimal trajectories are computed off-line based on a geometric formulation of dynamics that captures the nonlinear…
Drones, like most airborne aerial vehicles, face inherent disadvantages in achieving agile flight due to their limited thrust capabilities. These physical constraints cannot be fully addressed through advancements in control algorithms…
Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs) provide an effective way to actualize applications such as environment monitoring, search and rescue, and scientific researches. However, the conventional ASVs depends overly on the stored energy. Hybrid…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), especially fixed-wing ones that withstand strong winds, have great potential for oceanic exploration and research. This paper studies a UAV-aided maritime data collection system with a fixed-wing UAV…
Saving energy and enhancing performance are secular preoccupations shared by both nature and human beings. In animal locomotion, flapping flyers or swimmers rely on the flexibility of their wings or body to passively increase their…
We present an eikonal-based approach that is capable of finding a continuous globally optimal trajectory for an aircraft in a stationary wind field. This minimizes emissions and fuel consumption. If the destination is close to a cut locus…
Reaching fast and autonomous flight requires computationally efficient and robust algorithms. To this end, we train Guidance & Control Networks to approximate optimal control policies ranging from energy-optimal to time-optimal flight. We…
In this work, we establish an optimal control framework for airborne wind energy systems (AWESs) with flexible tethers. The AWES configuration, consisting of a six-degree-of-freedom aircraft, a flexible tether, and a winch, is formulated as…
In this article, we are interested in optimal aircraft trajectories in climbing phase. We consider the cost index criterion which is a convex combination of the time-to-climb and the fuel consumption. We assume that the thrust is constant…
Conventional harvesting problems for natural resources often assume physiological homogeneity of the body length/weight among individuals. However, such assumptions generally are not valid in real-world problems, where heterogeneity plays…
Real-time altitude control of airborne wind energy (AWE) systems can improve performance by allowing turbines to track favorable wind speeds across a range of operating altitudes. The current work explores the performance implications of…