Self-Sustainability in Nano Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: A Blimp Case Study

Abstract

Nowadays nano Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV's), such as quad-copters, have very limited flight times, tens of minutes at most. The main constraints are energy density of the batteries and the engine power required for flight. In this work, we present a nano-sized blimp platform, consisting of a helium balloon and a rotorcraft. Thanks to the lift provided by helium, the blimp requires relatively little energy to remain at a stable altitude. We also introduce the concept of duty-cycling high power actuators, to reduce the energy requirements for hovering even further. With the addition of a solar panel, it is even feasible to sustain tens or hundreds of flight hours in modest lighting conditions (including indoor usage). A functioning 52 gram prototype was thoroughly characterized and its lifetime was measured in different harvesting conditions. Both our system model and the experimental results indicate our proposed platform requires less than 200 mW to hover in a self sustainable fashion. This represents, to the best of our knowledge, the first nano-size UAV for long term hovering with low power requirements.