Auxiliary Power Unit Evaluation for Tethered UAV

Wasantha Samarathunga, Guangwei Wang, Shiqin Wang

This paper address a design evaluation problem of a main and auxiliary power unit designed for tethered unmanned aerial vehicles to avoid instantaneous power blackouts during flights.　 Generally in the absence of a cable power supply, APU must be able to ensure basic functionality for critical systems that should never go off line.  The design object is to provide a simple auxiliary battery power source and switch to battery power whenever the primary cable power is unavailable and switch back to cable power when the cable power is available during the UAV flight. This power switching is a technically challenging task when the UAV operates in low altitudes and carry heavy payloads. This requires switching high currents in a high speed logic. We propose a simple and more scalable design to solve the problem. Evaluation tests are carried out on consistency of the proposed APU. The experiments results shows that the outcome of our design is basically positive for further switching speed improvements, thus possible to serve as a priory in flight mission planning over geometrically complex terrains. Further this APU could be useful for hybrid or multi power sourced UAV designs.