Autonomous Soaring across Three Orders of Magnitude of Mass

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Autonomous Soaring across Three Orders of Magnitude of Mass

D. J. Edwards / A. D. Kahn / B. Poe

Autonomous soaring extracts energy from the environment to improve aircraft endurance. It does so by gaining altitude in the convective boundary layer. This technique has been tested on two aircraft that are three orders of magnitude apart in mass (0.410kg to 710kg), showing the technique's general applicability. Despite three orders of magnitude difference in weight, both aircraft showed successful closed-loop autonomous soaring guidance. In the smaller unmanned aircraft, the autopilot closed the guidance loop; in the manned aircraft, the pilot closed the guidance loop using commands from a flight director application called Thermal Finder. Both aircraft showed similar autonomous soaring behaviors. In addition, the updraft sensing described in this report is unaffected by inclusion of a propulsion system using a few simple tuning parameters, thereby widening the methods general applicability to other aircraft. Autonomous soaring holds great potential to increase endurance (and range) or reduce fuel consumption of soaring aircraft.