Multimodal Hybrid Powerplant for Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) Robotics

This paper presents a technique for determining the performance, feasibility and effectiveness of powerplant hybridisation for Uninhabited Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). A Hybrid Powerplant offers the possiblity of a radical improvement in the autonomy of the aircraft for various tasks without sacrificing payload range or endurance capability. In this work a prototype Aircraft Hybrid Powerplant (AHP) was designed, constructed and tested. It is shown that an additional 35 % power can be supplied from the hybrid system with an overall weight penalty of 5%, for a given UAS. A flight dynamic model was developed using the AeroSim ™ Blockset in MATLAB ® Simulink®. The results have shown that climb rates can be improved by 56 % and endurance increased by 13 % when using the hybrid powerplant concept. A variety of autonomous robotic aircraft tasks enabled by the hybrid powerplant is discussed.