40 Michael Erhard SkySails GmbH Veritaskai 3 D-21079 Hamburg Germany michael.erhard@skysails.de www.skysails.com
Design Challenges Towards Automated Flight Control
for Tethered Kites
Michael Erhard
SkySails GmbH
In order to operate power plants exploiting high altitude wind energy economically, a fully automated and reliable flight control of the airborne system is an indispensible prerequi-site and key to success. The highly dynamic operation modes as well as notable perturbations coming along with the natu-ral resource of wind pose extraordinary engineering challeng-es in setting up the data acquisition and control dchalleng-esigns for tethered kites. The first part of the talk summarizes a simple model used for control design and demonstrates its practical and robust applicability by presenting system identification data. Subsequently a brief overview of the controller design and controller performance is given. The second part aims at presenting the sensor data acquisition and navigation algo-rithm challenges to be tackled in order to achieve a robust au-tomated operation.
After an introduction of the sensor system, the focus is put on the discussion of exceptional conditions and solution ap-proaches developed during several years of flight experience. In summary, a grasp of the state-of-the art flight control as well as of major challenges to be tackled in the near future shall be given.
[1] M. Erhard, H. Strauch, Control of Towing Kites for Seagoing Vessels, IEEE Trans. Control Syst. Technol. (2012), DOI 10.1109/TCST.2012.2221093
[2] M. Erhard, H. Strauch, Sensors and Navigation Algorithms for Flight Control of Tethered Kites, Proc. European Control Conf. (2013), arXiv:1304.2233
[3] M. Erhard, H. Strauch, Theory and Experimental Validation of a Simple Compre-hensible Model of Tethered Kite Dynamics Used for Controller Design, submitted to Springer Book on Airborne Wind Energy (2013)
