Lorenzo Fagiano Associate Professor Politecnico di Milano
Dipartimento di Elettronica, Informazione e Bioingegneria
Piazza Leonardo da Vinci 32 20133 Milano
Italy
lorenzo.fagiano@polimi.it www.polimi.it
Automation Challenges in Airborne Wind Energy Systems
and the Role of Academic Research
Lorenzo Fagiano Politecnico di Milano
Airborne Wind Energy Systems have undergone major ad-vancements in the last 15 years. Starting from theoretical concepts, more and more sophisticated prototypes have been developed and tested. Today, a thriving community is fostering the industrialization of AWES. Airborne Wind Europe [1] has been founded and is channeling efforts to build industry standards, interact with public institu-tions, and establish suitable regulations to enable the use of AWES. For most concepts, questions like łCan you re-ally make it work?ž and łHow much energy can it gener-ate?ž have left space to engineering design and optimiza-tion processes and extensive test campaigns towards the goal of high reliability and full automation. A recent inde-pendent study [2] recognized the huge potential of AWES to contribute to the energy mix and to impact positively our economy and society, as well as the increasing mo-mentum of this sector. The same study also pointed out relevant challenges and a possible road-map to commer-cialization, which necessarily involves public-private syn-ergies.
Automation has always been and still is a distinctive as-pect of AWES, the source of its competitive advantages and of its development risks alike. It is thus not surprising that a large part of the technical challenges that must be resolved pertains to automation in a broader sense. As a matter of fact, AWES are more similar to autonomous
ve-hicles and safety-critical robotic systems than wind tur-bines. They have to carry out a task by maneuvering in an uncertain environment and taking decisions in auton-omy. They have to cope with partially unpredictable wind to remain airborne, and the wrong decision can lead to a catastrophic system failure. In this respect, AWES share the same major challenges that today are at the very cen-ter of R&D efforts in many industrial and academic sec-tors, concerned with fully autonomous systems and arti-ficial intelligence.
This talk will analyze the system automation challenges of AWES, in light of similar ones being addressed in other high-tech fields, and discuss the additional peculiar fea-tures of tethered airborne systems. The analysis will lead to reflections on the role of research universities and in-stitutes in this phase of AWES development, as a cru-cial part of the above-mentioned public-private collabo-rations.
References:
[1] Airborne Wind Europe, http://www.airbornewindeurope.org [2] European Commission, Study on Challenges in the commercialisation of airborne wind energy systems (2018) http://doi.org/10.2777/87591
