Björn Renneisen MSc Graduate Technische Universität Berlin Faculty V of Mechanical Engineering and
Transport Systems Department Methods of Product Development and Mechatronics
Straße des 17. Juni 135 10623 Berlin
Germany bjoern@renneisen.de www.mpm.tu-berlin.de
On Image Interpretation for Position Detection of Kites
Björn Renneisen, Jan Hummel, Dietmar Göhlich
Faculty V of Mechanical Engineering and Transport Systems, Technische Universität Berlin A method of contactless measuring the position and
ori-entation of a kite is presented. The market for sports and energy kites is growing steadily and it raises the prob-lem of parametrisation and measurement of these kites. Within the framework of a test bench development, a comparison between different measurement methods is done. Subsequently a method is developed with which it is possible to exactly determine the position and orienta-tion of the kite in the wind window. The system has no moving components and transmits the position and ori-entation information almost in real time.
The simulation of highly flexible airfoils, like a kite or a paraglider, needs a precise interaction of numeric FEM and CFD models. Due to the high flexibility, an accurate simulation with the fluid-structure interaction cannot be carried out with the available CAD/CAE tools. Currently the development of flexible wings is mostly being made with trial- and error, using a large number of prototypes. However, with a rising stage of maturation the recogni-tion of improvements, without objective measurements and a high investment in time and costs is not possible. Due to the size of the airfoil, including the line-system, it is not possible to test the whole system inside of a wind-tunnel. The downscaling of this flexible airfoil is with re-spect to the Reynolds number infeasible.
For this reasons a test bench is developed which allows to test and parametrise different types of kites. The whole test bench is moving at a specific velocity to simulate dif-ferent wind speeds.
Due to the evaluation as well as the automatic steering, it
is indispensable to know the exact position of the object in the wind window. In this manner it is possible to con-nect the picture, the calculated position and other mea-surement data like the line force in the post processing. In addition, a precise automatic control of the kite is only possible if the main system has reliable positioning infor-mation in real-time.
