Continued Development and Flight Testing of a Long-Endurance Solar-Powered Unmanned Aircraft: UIUC-TUM Solar Flyer

The growing application space of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is creating the need for aircraft capable of autonomous, long-distance, and long-endurance flights. The two main challenges are the limited power capacity of UAVs, as well as the adaptation to real-time detected stimuli, changing the course of the mission. This paper describes the continuous development of the UIUC-TUM Solar Flyer, which is equipped with low-power, high-performance computing capabilities. The Solar Flyer addresses the aforementioned challenges by balancing power consumption and solar power generation, and by performing on-board data processing, to enable real-time mission adaptation. The Solar Flyer was developed from commercial-of-the-shelf components, making it affordable for a wide variety of applications. Current efforts have built on previous work in terms of airframe, avionics, and flight software. Significant effort has been allocated to the re-design of the propulsion and energy systems as well as the re-organization of the aircraft system layout. The avionics and the open-source uavAP flight software were integrated into the aircraft, which was recently flight tested in a variety of conditions, confirming aircraft power consumption and production values.