Energy Model for Small-scale Flying Robots
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are used in more and more applications in the real world. These applications range from inspection tasks, e.g., bridges and wind turbines to agriculture applications like protection of deer from harvesters. However, most of these applications are still done using remotely piloted UAVs, even though the usage of autonomous quadcopters as replacements promises additional benefits like tighter surveillance and less cost. Especially, swarms of UAVs promise high efficiency with low-cost UAVs. UAVs, in general, promise efficient deployment and manoeuvrability even in hardly accessible areas, for example, in natural disaster management. The benefit in manoeuvrability comes at the cost of high energy consumption of the robots. To create an optimal mission plan and take appropriate decisions during the mission, a reliable, accurate and adaptive energy model is of utmost importance. However, most existing approaches either use very generic models or ones that are especially tailored towards a specific UAV. We present a generic energy model that is based on decomposing a robotic system into multiple observable components. More details can be found here:
- Christoph Steup, Simon Parlow, Sebastian Mai and Sanaz Mostaghim
- Generic Component-based Mission-centric Energy Model for Micro-scale Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
- Drones, 4(4), 63, September 2020. https://doi.org/10.3390/drones4040063 Open Access --> Link
And here you see a video of our flying robot during the energy test: