Regresar

Analysis of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Based on Solar Energy

Abstract:

In recent years unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) have been used to perform some tasks such as inspection, surveillance, military applications, among others. The performance of an UAV is evaluated based on 3 characteristics: planning, control, and autonomy. The autonomy of an UAV is limited by the amount of energy available in its batteries. Several research works have focused to estimate and increasing the flight time. In this work, the increase in the flight autonomy is evaluated considering the installation of photovoltaic cells in the UAV fuselage in order to increase the flight time using solar energy. The proposed methodology includes mechanical analysis, UAV mathematical model that allows calculating the energy balance for determining the flight time. The results show that the flight time increases about 1 h 46 min considering the installation of a set of solar cells over the UAV fuselage under study.