Development and Testing of a Control System for the Automatic Flight of Tethered Parafoils
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Development and Testing of a Control System for the Automatic Flight of Tethered Parafoils •••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••• Joseph Coleman, Hammad Ahmad, and Daniel Toal Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland Received 30 July 2014; accepted 16 February 2016 This paper presents the design and testing of a control system for the robotic flight of tethered kites. The use of tethered kites as a prime mover in airborne wind energy is undergoing active research in several quarters. There also exist several additional applications for the remote or autonomous control of tethered kites, such as aerial sensor and communications platforms. The system presented is a distributed control system consisting of three primary components: an instrumented tethered kite, a kite control pod, and a ground control and power takeoff station. A detailed description of these constituent parts is provided, with design considerations and constraints outlined. Flight tests of the system have been carried out, and a range of results and system performance data from these are presented and discussed. C 2016 The Authors Journal of Field Robotics Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 1. INTRODUCTION are performed from the ground. Examples of such systems are Kitenergy (Milanese, Taddei, & Milanese, 2013) and Tethered kites including ram-air inflated parafoils, pneu- EnerKite (Bormann, Maximilian, Kovesdi,¨ Gebhardt, & matically inflated kites (Jehle & Schmehl, 2014), and rigid Skutnik, 2013). These systems have the advantage of wings (Ruiterkamp & Sieberling, 2013) promise low-cost increased system simplicity as the requirement for a kite access to high altitudes above ground with minimal ma- control pod is eliminated, however at least two tethers are terial, civil, and logistics costs. This technology effectively required, which increases the airborne system weight and aims to displace the use of towers to elevate wind energy drag with tether length more rapidly than single tether systems above ground level. The increased wind speeds at systems. elevations up to approximately 1,000 m above ground have KitePower has investigated several kite types and con- spurred the active area of airborne wind energy (AWE) re- trol methods for these. The main demonstrator is a control search (Archer, 2013; Archer & Caldeira, 2009). Other appli- pod actuated tube kite, where the kite geometry is defined cations of such technology also exist, such as low-cost aerial by an inflated tube structure with a stretched membrane platforms for sensors and communications equipment. The skin. The KitePower control pod features two servo actua- replacement of civil structures with smart, airborne systems tors that independently control the steering and depower introduces a challenging embedded systems and control functions of the kite (Fechner & Schmehl, 2012). A kite- problem, namely maintaining the safe, persistent flight of plane hybrid has also been demonstrated by van der Vlugt, the airborne system in a range of flight modes and weather Peschel, and Schmehl (2013). conditions. Solving this challenge is a key step in the de- Controller development and testing for AWE systems velopment of tethered airborne systems. A diverse range can be performed in incremental steps of increasing com- of hardware system architectures have been presented to plexity and precision. As an initial step, pilot in-the-loop date by many researchers and developers. Skysails in Er- control is achieved whereby a remote fly-by-radio system is hard & Strauch, 2013 and Maaß & Erhard, 2013 use an air- implemented. In such systems, a human pilot visually flies borne control pod with a single actuator to fly large parafoil the wing through the movement of a joystick or similar in- kites automatically ahead of cargo ships in a towing ap- put device providing remote control to actuators on the kite plication, providing a reduction in ship fuel consumption. or on the kite control pod. A pilot familiar with the manual Skysails in Fritz (2013) outline a 55 kW land-based electri- control of kites can quickly adapt to such a control system, cal power production prototype, which leverages the ship tuning their response to the kite motion, and achieving towing technology in a power-production application. stable flight. With the introduction of automatic controllers, An alternative power production approach utilizes increasing system autonomy can be achieved. As the com- a parafoil kite connected to ground-based actuators in plexity of the control system increases, additional sensors which both the power takeoff and kite-steering functions and processing effort are required compared to human in- Direct correspondence to: [email protected] the-loop operation. Such controllers require high-frequency Journal of Field Robotics, 1–20 (2016) C 2016 The Authors Journal of Field Robotics Published by Wiley Periodicals, Inc. View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com • DOI: 10.1002/rob.21652 This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. 2 • Journal of Field Robotics—2016 estimations of kite position and orientation for the pro- 2. Use of a control-pod actuation method to avoid addi- vision of closed-loop feedback. The ultimate aim of such tional drag of multiple tethers trailing to a ground sta- systems is the demonstration of reliable, persistent, fully tion. autonomous control of tethered wings, and much progress 3. Independently actuated steering implemented on the has been made recently on a variety of hardware platforms. control pod where the steering lines are actuated sep- Leading examples of such systems include Fagiano, arately and together form a longitudinal and lateral con- Zgraggen, Khammash, and Morari (2013a) and Fagiano, trol input, using symmetrical and asymmetrical line dis- Zgraggen, Morari, and Khammash (2013b), where, using placements, respectively. a ground-actuated control system, a number of automatic 4. A pumping-mode winching ground station that uses flight tests are conducted where the wing is maintained in separate, dedicated electrical machines for the power stable figure-of-8 orbits. Good accuracy between a dynamic generation and recovery tasks. Each machine is appro- model of the system and the field test data is shown. Jehle priately sized for the task it performs. and Schmehl (2014) present a tracking controller as applied in field-testing to a prototype 25 m2 leading-edge inflatable Through field tests, the suitability of the flexible kite, (LEI) kite system for pumping-mode AWE power genera- control pod, and distributed control system are examined. tion. A cascaded control system is outlined with a bearing The field-testing is aimed at both the testing of suitable con- controller as an outer loop and an attitude controller as an trol system hardware required to fly tethered kites and the inner loop providing the steering actuator set point. Project- development and testing of estimation and control algo- ing a figure of 8 onto the tether unit sphere, they present ex- rithms for AWE kites. perimental results of the controllers tracking this trajectory. Much of the kite control systems research is focused on 2. SYSTEM DESCRIPTION power takeoff (electrical or mechanical) applications within Pumping mode airborne wind energy uses a tethered wing the AWE sector. In Argatov and Silvennoinen (2010), the au- to extract power from the wind. Operating in a periodic thors present the formulation of a generic pumping mode pumping cycle, the tethered wing is flown in a high-lift kite system in which practical design considerations such as periodic orbit about the wind vector. This produces high factors of safety for the tether and minimum bend radii are tension in the tether, which pays out from a tether drum. included. Legislative restrictions, in this case U.S. Federal Thus, mechanical power is produced on the ground station Aviation Administration (FAA) regulations, are included. driveshaft. At the maximum tether length, the power phase The analytical modeling of apparent wind load effects on ends and a recovery phase begins where the wing is flown the tether of a pumping-mode AWE system is detailed in in a low-lift configuration and is winched in to the starting Argatov, Rautakorpi, and Silvennonien (2011), which ana- tether length, using a fraction of the previously generated lyzes the degradation of system power output at extended power. This cycle continues, somewhat analogous to a tether lengths where the influence of tether drag becomes slow-moving long-stroke piston engine. At the ground pronounced. station, electrical power takeoff is performed by a generator Having attained long-term stable flight systems and connected via a drivetrain to the tether drum, as shown algorithms, an alternative application also exists: low-cost outlined in Figure 1 (Coleman, Ahmad, Pican, & Toal, aerial sensor platforms. Using kites as aerial imaging 2014). platforms offers low-cost access to altitude, providing A tethered kite control system requires a distributed aerial imagery for a variety of survey and agricultural control system. The control system can be divided into applications (Murray, Neal, & Labrosse, 2013) or geomor- three main subsystems: the ground station, the control pod, phology mapping (Boike & Yoshikawa, 2003). Systems and