Airborne wind energy is an emerging technology that uses tethered unmanned aerial vehicles for harvesting wind energy at altitudes higher than conventional towered wind turbines. To make the technology competitive to other renewable energy technologies a reliable control system is required that allows autonomously operating the system throughout all phases of flight. In the present work a cascaded nonlinear control scheme for reliable pumping cycle control of a rigid wing airborne wind energy system is proposed. The high-level control strategy in the form of a state machine as well as the flight controller consisting of path-following guidance and control, attitude, and rate loop is presented along with a winch controller for tether force tracking. A mathematical model for an existing prototype will be derived, and results from a simulation study will be used to demonstrate the robustness of the proposed concept in the presence of turbulence and wind gusts.

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Copyright © 2019 by the authors. Published by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc., with permission. All requests for copying and permission to reprint should be submitted to CCC at www.copyright.com; employ the eISSN 1533-3884 to initiate your request. See also AIAA Rights and Permissions www.aiaa.org/randp.

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Acknowledgments

This research has been supported financially by the project AWESCO (H2020-ITN-642682), funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 642682. The authors would like to thank the team of Kitemill AS for supporting this work, in particular Sture Smidt for carrying out the CFD and XFLR5 analysis of the aircraft.

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Received2 December 2018
Accepted6 May 2019
Published online2 June 2019

Cascaded Pumping Cycle Control for Rigid Wing Airborne Wind Energy Systems

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