Aerospace Engineering Commons^™

Real-Time Strategies For Enhancing Aircraft Performance In Wind, Kamran Turkoglu

Kamran Turkoglu

This thesis presents real-time guidance strategies for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that can be used to enhance their flight endurance by utilizing insitu measurements of wind speeds and wind gradients. In these strategies, periodic adjustments can be made in the airspeed and/or heading angle command for the UAV to minimize a projected power requirement at some future time. In this thesis, UAV flights are described by a three-dimensional dynamic point-mass model. A stochastic wind field model has been developed not only to reflect the mean wind magnitude behaviour in both vertical and horizontal axis, but also has it been extended …