Hysteresis Control of a Kite Flying Figure-of-Eight Maneuvers

Drone perspective of Kitepower’s 25 m2_{kite flying automatic figure-of-eight maneuvers, while the} 40 and 60 m2_{kites are setup on the ground at the former naval airbase Valkenburg (8 May 2018)}

Masafumi Narikawa

University of Fukui Department of Human and Artificial

Intelligent Systems Interactive Robotics Laboratory 3-9-1, Bunkyo, Fukui-shi, Fukui, 910-8507

Japan

mnarikawa@ir.his.u-fukui.ac.jp www.ir.his.u-fukui.ac.jp

Hysteresis Control of a Kite Flying Figure-of-Eight Maneuvers

Masafumi Narikawa, Yasutake Takahashi

University of Fukui We are interested in wind power generation using a kite

and the behavior of the figure-eight flight based on a sim-ple controller. The kite flies dynamically, executing cer-tain maneuvers instead of being stationary in air. Among the proposed maneuvers, a figure-eight flight path is con-sidered to be the most efficient. In conventional meth-ods to perform the figure-eight flight path, the kite needs to be controlled so that it follows a predefined trajectory. Moreover, the controller requires precise real time infor-mation on the kite position, on the kite orientation, and on the wind surrounding the flying object. However, the foil kite is susceptible to wind and requires precise control order to follow the target trajectory in response to wind conditions, which are difficult to predict.

We propose a simple switching/hysteresis controller based only on the attitude angle of the kite to realize a figure-eight maneuver flight. With this approach, the con-troller does not require any additional information, such as position or height of the kite in the air. We verified the feasibility of this method when realizing a figure-eight maneuver under wind disturbance with FreeKiteSim [1]. The foil kite is assumed to rotate around the z-axis at the top of the kite. The angle is called the attitude angle of the kite. We propose a hysteresis controller that controls the kite to rotate counterclockwise when the attitude angle exceeds a certain threshold θ or rotate clockwise when the attitude angle is less than −θ.

We investigated the figure- eight flight trajectory and the stability of the kite under various wind conditions: no wind disturbance, sine wave change of the wind

speed, and changes following the Dryden wind turbu-lence model. The figure below shows an example of the flight trajectory of the kite under the hysteresis control when subjected to the Dryden wind turbulence model. All experimental results show that the kite can perform stable figure-eight maneuvers under various wind condi-tions when using the proposed hysteresis controller.

0.6 0.4 0.2 0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6

azimuth[rad]

elevation[rad]

Flight trajectory under the wind condition based on the Dryden wind turbulence model (wind speed 6m/s base)

This work was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Num-ber 16K00647.

References:

[1] Fechner, U., van der Vlugt, R., Schreuder, E., Schmehl, R.: Dy-namic model of a pumping kite power system. Renewable Energy 83, pp. 705ś716 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1016/j.renene.2015.04.028