Autonomous dynamic soaring

author = "Mark Boslough",

booktitle = "2017 IEEE Aerospace Conference",

title = "Autonomous dynamic soaring",

year = "2017",

month = "4-11 " # mar,

address = "Big Sky, MT, USA",

keywords = "genetic algorithms, genetic programming",

DOI = "

doi:10.1109/AERO.2017.7943967",

size = "20 pages",

abstract = "This project makes use of biomimetic behavioural engineering in which adaptive strategies used by animals in the real world are applied to the development of autonomous robots. The key elements of the biomimetic approach are to observe and understand a survival behaviour exhibited in nature, to create a mathematical model and simulation capability for that behaviour, to modify and optimise the behaviour for a desired robotics application, and to implement it. The application described in this report is dynamic soaring, a behaviour that certain sea birds use to extract flight energy from laminar wind velocity gradients in the shallow atmospheric boundary layer directly above the ocean surface. Theoretical calculations, computational proof-of-principle demonstrations, and the first instrumented experimental flight test data for dynamic soaring are presented to address the feasibility of developing dynamic soaring flight control algorithms to sustain the flight of unmanned airborne vehicles (UAVs). Both hardware and software were developed for this application. Eight-foot custom foam glider were built and flown in a steep shear gradient. A logging device was designed and constructed with custom software to record flight data during dynamic soaring manoeuvres. A computational tool kit was developed to simulate dynamic soaring in special cases and with a full 6-degree of freedom flight dynamics model in a generalised time-dependent wind field. Several 3-dimensional visualization tools were built to replay the flight simulations. A realistic aerodynamics model of an eight-foot sailplane was developed using measured aerodynamic derivatives. Genetic programming methods were developed and linked to the simulations and visualization tools. These tools can now be generalised for other biomimetic behaviour applications. This work was carried out in 2000 and 2001, and until now its results have only been available in an internal Sandia report.",

notes = "Wandering albatross Also known as \cite{7943967}",