Dynamic soaring of unmanned aerial vehicles is a promising way to increase range and endurance by extracting energy from the atmosphere. To further advance the endeavour of establishing autonomous dynamic soaring, this work proposes a concertedly developed trajectory planning and tracking approach. Optimal control methods are applied to pre-compute smooth loitering dynamic soaring trajectories for different wind conditions. To reduce the complexity of the optimization, a model of reduced order is used and controls are parameterized to obtain smooth trajectories and reduce onboard storage requirements. Furthermore, a two cascaded path tracking controller is presented and higher fidelity closed-loop simulations compare the performance of the pre-computed trajectories for different wind conditions.     «

Dynamic soaring of unmanned aerial vehicles is a promising way to increase range and endurance by extracting energy from the atmosphere. To further advance the endeavour of establishing autonomous dynamic soaring, this work proposes a concertedly developed trajectory planning and tracking approach. Optimal control methods are applied to pre-compute smooth loitering dynamic soaring trajectories for different wind conditions. To reduce the complexity of the optimization, a model of reduced order i...     »