Dynamic soaring is a flying technique to exploit the energy available in wind shear layers, enabling potentially unlimited flight without the need for internal energy sources. We propose a framework for autonomous dynamic soaring with a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The framework makes use of an explicit representation of the wind field and a classical approach for guidance and control of the UAV. Robustness to wind field estimation error is achieved by constructing point-wise robust reference paths for dynamic soaring and the development of a robust path following controller for the fixed-wing UAV. The framework is evaluated in dynamic soaring scenarios in simulation and real flight tests. In simulation, we demonstrate robust dynamic soaring flight subject to varied wind conditions, estimation errors and disturbances. Critical components of the framework, including energy predictions and path-following robustness, are further validated in real flights to assure small sim-to-real gap. Together, our results strongly indicate the ability of the proposed framework to achieve autonomous dynamic soaring flight in wind shear.

翻译：动态翱翔是一种利用风切变层中可用能量的飞行技术，能够实现无需内部能源的潜在无限飞行。我们提出了一种用于固定翼无人机自主动态翱翔的框架。该框架利用风场的显式表示以及无人机导引与控制的经典方法。通过构建动态翱翔的点态鲁棒参考路径，并开发适用于固定翼无人机的鲁棒路径跟踪控制器，实现了对风场估计误差的鲁棒性。该框架在仿真和实际飞行测试中的动态翱翔场景中进行了评估。在仿真中，我们展示了在变化的风况、估计误差和干扰下实现鲁棒的动态翱翔飞行。框架的关键组成部分，包括能量预测和路径跟踪鲁棒性，在实际飞行中进一步得到验证，以确保较小的仿真到现实差距。综合而言，我们的结果有力地表明，所提出的框架能够在风切变中实现自主动态翱翔飞行。