An Automated Battery Management System to Enable Persistent Missions With Multiple Aerial Vehicles
- 2 January 2014
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) in IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics
- Vol. 20 (1), 275-286
- https://doi.org/10.1109/tmech.2013.2294805
Abstract
This paper presents the development and hardware implementation of an autonomous battery maintenance mechatronic system that significantly extends the operational time of battery powered small-scaled unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). A simultaneous change and charge approach is used to overcome the significant downtime experienced by existing charge-only approaches. The automated system quickly swaps a depleted battery of a UAV with a replenished one while simultaneously recharging several other batteries. This results in a battery maintenance system with low UAV downtime, arbitrarily extensible operation time, and a compact footprint. Hence, the system can enable multi-agent UAV missions that require persistent presence. This capability is illustrated by developing and testing in flight a centralized autonomous planning and learning algorithm that incorporates a probabilistic health model dependent on vehicle battery health that is updated during the mission, and replans to improve the performance based on the improved model. Flight test results are presented for a 3-h-long persistent mission with three UAVs that each has an endurance of 8-10 min on a single battery charge (more than 100 battery swaps).Keywords
Funding Information
- Boeing Research & Technology
This publication has 18 references indexed in Scilit:
- Self-Contained Autonomous Indoor Flight with Ranging Sensor NavigationJournal of Guidance, Control, and Dynamics, 2012
- Automatic Battery Replacement System for UAVs: Analysis and DesignPublished by Springer Science and Business Media LLC ,2011
- UAV Consumable Replenishment: Design Concepts for Automated Service StationsJournal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems, 2010
- Cooperative manipulation and transportation with aerial robotsAutonomous Robots, 2010
- An intelligent Cooperative Control ArchitecturePublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2010
- Real-time indoor autonomous vehicle test environmentIEEE Control Systems, 2008
- Persistent Surveillance Using Multiple Unmanned Air Vehicles2008 IEEE Aerospace Conference, 2008
- A first-stage experiment of long term activity of autonomous mobile robot — result of repetitive base-docking over a weekPublished by Springer Science and Business Media LLC ,2007
- Recent Research in Cooperative Control of Multivehicle SystemsJournal of Dynamic Systems, Measurement, and Control, 2007
- High-altitude platforms for wireless communicationsElectronics & Communication Engineering Journal, 2001