Research Summaries

Back Enhancing Endurance for High-Altitude UxS

Fiscal Year 2019
Division Research & Sponsored Programs
Department NPS Naval Research Program
Investigator(s) Ross, Isaac M.
Sponsor NPS Naval Research Program (Navy)
Summary Very long endurance is a potential game-changer in advancing high altitude persistent ISR systems. High endurance is conventionally achieved by means of system design, lightweight hardware and other engineering means. Regardless of the type of UxS used, nearly all systems use static or semi-static means to achieve persistence. For instance, for a UAV, it is customary to fly in circles or other elegant geometric shapes to achieve persistence. At NPS, we have shown that much longer endurance can be achieved for such systems by harnessing the nonlinearities of the UxS rather than “rejecting” it by linearization or other control techniques. In addition, our methods can exploit real-time environmental data (e.g., wind conditions, thermals etc.) and autonomously determine the best strategy for high endurance. The resulting “flight design” for persistence is almost never a recognizable geometric shape like circles or figure-eights; rather, they are dynamically achieved in real time based on the UxS properties and the best possible available data. A side benefit of this flight design is “unpredictability” and “low observability” with respect to an adversary. It is important to note that the dynamic flight design has the capability to incorporate constraints imposed by the physics of the sensors onboard the UxS (e.g. view angle, geometry etc.). The proposed scope of the FY19 effort is to demonstrate these ideas on a UxS of interest to the sponsor. The PI and his students are cleared at the TS/SCI level.

Deliverables for this project include simulations of new flight designs for high altitude persistent ISR systems, the thesis of contributing NPS student(s), a potentially classified end-of-project Executive Summary and an unclassified NRP Research Poster.
Keywords
Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal