"Albatross": How military drones should stay in the air for as long as possible
Military drones should consume as little energy as possible in order to stay in the air for a long time. Flight strategies can be adopted from birds.
The scientists want to use glider drones to research autonomous gliding.
(Image: UTEP)
In the “Albatross” project funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), scientists at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP) are investigating strategies for keeping military drones in the air for as long as possible with as little energy expenditure as possible. The researchers want to find out how flight strategies can be adopted by birds that can soar particularly long and over long distances without flapping their wings.
Some birds with a larger wingspan, such as albatrosses, can cover long distances with little effort. They generally use thermals, which are created when the sun warms the earth and warm air masses rise. If a bird glides slower than the air rises, the rising air provides the bird with lift.
Birds move between falling and rising air currents. This enables them to cover long distances without having to flap their wings and thus consume energy. The researchers at UTEP want to use this for fixed-wing drones in the future to keep them in the air for as long as possible with as little energy as possible. The problem, however, is detecting these air currents, as they are small, short-lived, random and are not captured by conventional weather models, explains John Bird, Professor of Aerospace Engineering at UTEP and a member of the “Albatross” research project.
Autonomous gliding
The scientists therefore want to start by investigating how they can determine these unknown factors, including potential energy savings, and translate them into a flight plan for autonomous gliding. Studies on this in the past have not made much progress. Their findings could not yet be sufficiently transferred to long-haul flights with drones. The scientists now hope to change this. They intend to remove the limitation on the range of drones by reducing their energy requirements. This is because unmanned aircraft rely heavily on stored energy to keep them in the air. By adopting the upwind strategies of birds, this could be drastically reduced, and military drones, for example, could be kept in the air for longer without consuming too much energy.
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The findings could then also be transferred to other aircraft, not just those used for military purposes. Such unmanned drones could, for example, be used to monitor areas for environmental monitoring or disaster relief operations.
(olb)
