Contraction Analysis of Dynamic Soaring
Imran Mir, Sameh A. Eisa, Adnan Maqsood, Faiza Gul
Abstract
View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2022-0881.vid Dynamic soaring as exhibited by soaring birds is an engineless flight mode that utilizes energy available in the horizontal wind shear. Realizing the immense potential of dynamic soaring, efforts were made to incorporate dynamic soaring into the navigation algorithm of UAVs. Although a considerable amount of research covering optimization, control, and simulation aspects of UAVs performing dynamic soaring is performed, there is little to nonconclusive work analyzing the stability of such UAVs about the soaring orbits. In this research, a comprehensive framework for determining the stability of soaring UAVs utilizing the nonlinear Contraction-theory-based technique is presented. The stated approach is selected as it could analyze the stability of the nonlinear system directly without the explicit need for system linearization about equilibria. Parametric variation along with numerical simulations was conducted to ascertain the response of the actual nonlinear system when perturbed from its nominal motion and to provide generalized results for the soaring UAV problem. Our analysis, supported by simulations, suggests that the UAV system set to perform dynamic soaring is inherently unstable.