Airborne Wind Energy Conference 2017 Book of Abstracts

AWEsome: An Affordable Standardized Open-Source
Test Platform for AWE Systems
Christoph Sieg 1 , Thomas Gehrmann 2 , Philip Bechtle 2 , Udo Zillmann 3
1 KiteSwarms Ltd., Humboldt University Berlin, 2 Bonn University, 3 Daidalos Capital
The development of AWE systems requires significant financial
investments and man-power for engineering the
required hard- and software components. For research
groups and startups this is a major hurdle that has to be
overcome to get the first prototype into the air. Many algorithms
and concepts are, however, universal and not
specific to the individual approach. They could in principle
be shared in an open environment between all stakeholders
in AWE to the benefit of the individual project and
the AWE community as a whole. It is our aim to facilitate
the development of such an open platform: AWEsome,
the “AWE Standardized Open-source Model Environment”.
We present an affordable test platform for airborne
wind energy systems that consists of low-cost (below
US$ 1000) hardware and is entirely based on open source
software. It can hence be used without the need of large
financial investments, in particular by research groups
and startups to test their design strategies, to facilitate inexpensive
tests of new ideas, to train themselves in flight
operations before switching to more expensive hardware,
or for PR purposes. We also expect that the control system
can be easily adapted to different hardware platforms
and steering strategies.
Our system consists of a modified off-the-shelf model aircraft
that is controlled by the pixhawk autopilot hardware
and the ardupilot software, ArduPlane, for fixed wing aircraft.
The autopilot software can be compiled for different
target hardware and also a SITL environment. It provides
full logging of sensor data, derived data and control
commands. Moreover, it employs the MAVlink protocol
for a two-way-communication with a ground control station
(GCS). The latter is a simple PC or laptop running the
respective software, e.g Mission Planner or APM Planner.
We have implemented new flight modes for the autonomous
flight of the aircraft attached to a tether of constant
length along periodic patterns. The control algorithms
are developed and tested using the SITL environment
together with the flight dynamics model JSBsim.
Moreover, first field tests have been performed and the
respective data has been analyzed, including also measurements
of the system’s performance.
All developments are available on GitHub and [1] for the
benefit of the entire community.
Some main future developments are the construction of
a winch system controlled by ardupilot, the integration
of additional sensors and of upgrades to the pixhawk autopilot
hardware and the improvements of the flight control
software and of the simulation environment.
We invite other research groups, startups and maker
space projects to join this open source development and
contribute to a common playground for the whole AWE
community.
References:
[1] www.awesome.physik.uni-bonn.de
Christoph Sieg
Physicist
Kiteswarms Ltd.
Grey House
Vention Lane
EX33 1LD Putsborough
United Kingdom
christoph@kiteswarms.com
www.kiteswarms.com
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