Fixed-Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Research in fixed-wing UAVs is performing its baby steps at the Autonomous Robots Lab. A relevant video is shown on the right. Our goal is to enhance the autonomy of fixed-wing aerial robots and emphasize on their robust control, GPS-denied navigation, autonomous path planning, and decentralized multi-vehicle operation. We believe that fixed-wing aerial robots that present extreme endurance capabilities are of great relevant to a large variety of critical applications including infrastructure inspection, environmental monitoring, security surveillance and more. As we are currently building the relevant research team of the lab, we are inviting interested students from all disciplines to contact us and investigate research opportuninities in the fields of vehicle design, control, state estimation, perception systems, path plannijng, multi-robot cooperation and more. 
Although fixed-wing UAVs research is at its early stages for our lab, Dr. Kostas Alexis has conducted previous work in the field. A set of indicative results is presented below. 
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#WorldRecord! We demonstrated 81h Continuous Flight using the AtlantikSolar UAV. Our system was charging during the day to cross the night and this took place for more than 3 days! This is the world record for any aircraft below 50kg. And it happened with a small system of 5.6m wingspan and 6.5kg weight! 
Dr. Alexis has been working on the topic of control and autonomous navigation of long-endurance solar fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicles. This research took place within the framework of the ICARUS project and has synergies with the SHERA project in which the Autonomous Systems Lab (ASL) of ETH Zurich participated. The ASL fixed-wing fleet aimed to show capabilities relevant with long-term inspection, search and rescue, monitoring and surveillance. Furthermore, AtlantikSolar, a project organized by ASL and related with multiple-days continuous flight with small solar UAVs, has a central role on my work with my contributions there being related with its control functions, modeling and flight behaviour analysis. The relevant work utilized two platforms developed by ASL, namely theAtlantikSolar and the senseSoar. Below you find photos and videos from these efforts.  

#WorldRecord

This is a world record! We demonstrated 81h Continuous Flight using the AtlantikSolar UAV. Our system was charging during the day to cross the night and this took place for more than 3 days! This is the world record for any aircraft below 50kg!

28h Flight!

That's a big step! We demonstrated 28h of continuous flight. We crossed the night based on the solar-powered charing we received during the day! This is the major step towards achieving perpetual flight. Our goal will be to demonstrate multi-day flight soon!

Aerial Mapping Operations

Aerial mapping is among the most straightforward and interesting applications for aerial robotics. And when you have a system that can fly for multiple days this is even more obvious! Watch this video where we demonstrate these capabilities. 

Back from Field-Testing!

This video presents a small subset of the ICARUS activities that took place during the ICARUS Field Trials in Marche-en-Famenne, Belgium during 8-12 of September 2014. The ASL Fixed-Wing team went there with the AtlantikSolar UAV and presented its advanced capabilities regarding long endurance flight, advanced estimation and control, autonomous navigation for complete coverage and its perception capabilities for search and rescue and map reconstruction.

Back from Field-Testing!

This video presents a very short summary of the ICARUS activities during the field-trials demonstration that took place between 21st to 25th of July 2014, in the CTC UAV Test Site which is located in the Collsuspina area around Barcelona. These field trials were organized within the framework of the ICARUS FP7 Project (http://www.fp7-icarus.eu/). During this event, the ASL team presented the capabilities of the AtlantikSolar platform.

SenseSoar is a UAVs designed for solar-powered flight. This video presents verification of several avionics modules.
Our work on the solar-powered UAVs and their navigation problem has been published in the following:
  • Philipp Oettershagen, Amir Melzer, Stefan Leutenegger, Kostas Alexis, Roland Y. Siegwart, "Explicit Model Predictive Control and L1-Navigation Strategies for Fixed–Wing UAV Path Tracking", Mediterranean Control Conference, 2014, Palermo, Italy, June 16-June 19, 2014
  • S. Leutenegger, A. Melzer, K. Alexis, R. Siegwart, "Robust State Estimation for Small Unmanned Airplanes", IEEE Multiconference on Systems and Control (MSC), 2014, Antibes, France
  • A. Bircher, K. Alexis, M. Burri, P. Oettershagen, S. Omari, T. Mantel, R. Siegwart, "Structural Inspection Path Planning via Iterative Viewpoint Resampling with Application to Aerial Robotics", IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation, May 26-30, 2015 (ICRA 2015), Seattle, Washington, USA
  • P. Oettershagen, A. Melzer, T. Mantel, K. Rudin, R. Lotz, D. Siebenmann, S. Leutenegger, K. Alexis, R. Siegwart, "A Solar-Powered Hand-Launchable UAV for Low-Altitude Multi-Day Continuous Flight", IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation, May 26-30, 2015 (ICRA 2015), Seattle, Washington, USA
  • G. De Cubber, D. Doroftei, H. Balta, Y. Baudoin, Y. Yvinec, D. Serrano, K. Alexis, R. Wagemans, "Field experience on deploying unmanned aerial systems for search and rescue and demining", IEEE International Conference on Robotics & Automation, WS on "Robotics & Automation Technologies for Humanitarian Applications: Where we are & Where we can be", May 26-30, 2015 (ICRA 2015), Seattle, Washington, USA
  • P. Oettershagen, T. J. Stastny, T. A. Mantel, A. S. Melzer, K. Rudin, G. Agamennoni, K. Alexis and R. Siegwart, "Long-Endurance Sensing and Mapping using a Hand-Launchable Solar-Powered UAV", Field and Service Robotics 2015 (FSR2015), Toronto, June 24-26, 2015 - Jointly with this paper we released a relevant dataset which is publicly available here: http://projects.asl.ethz.ch/datasets/doku.php?id=fsr2015
  • H. Balta, J. Bedkowski, S. Govindaraj, K. Majek, P. Musialik, D. Serrano, K. Alexis, R. Siegwart, G. de Cubber, “Integrated Data Management for A Fleet of Search and Rescue Robots”, Journal of Field Robotics, accepted (awaiting publication)​
  • P. Oettershagen, A. Melzer, T. Mantel, K. Rudin, T. Stastny, B. Wawrzacz, K. Alexis, and R. Siegwart, "Perpetual flight with a small solar-powered UAV: Flight results, performance analysis and model validation", IEEE Aerospace Conference (AeroConf) 2016, Yellowstone Conference, Big Sky, Montana, Mar 5-16, 2016 
  • P. Oettershagen, A. Melzer, T. Mantel, K. Rudin, T. Stastny, B. Wawrzacz, T. Hinzmann, S. Leutenegger, K. Alexis, and R. Siegwart, "Design of small hand-launched solar-powered UAVs: From concept study to a multi-day world endurance record flight", Journal of Field Robotics (accepted - awaiting publication)

Online presentations on the project: