Energy System Instrumentation and Data Acquisition for Flight Testing of a Long-Endurance, Solar-Powered Unmanned Aircraft

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. The UIUC-TUM Solar Flyer addresses the aforementioned challenges by balancing power consumption and solar power generation, and therefore enabling on-board data processing for real-time mission adaptation. This paper describes the energy system instrumentation and data acquisition integrated into the aircraft, enabling long-endurance flight testing to be performed. The paper presents an overview of the aircraft and avionics, details regarding energy system instrumentation, and then flight test results from a 1 hour flight performed under near ideal conditions in the Fall of 2020.