Modeling and Tracking Control of Tethered Kite Systems

Tethered kites are emerging devices that can take the advantage of high altitude wind energy by controlling their flight paths. In this paper, the tracking control methods of tethered kite systems for both ship propulsion and power generation are presented. A simplified control model for a single kite system is derived to predigest calculation. With the objective of guiding the kite to follow a figure-of-eight trajectory, a simple control scheme based on velocity angle control is introduced for the ship propulsion system and a nonlinear model predictive controller is designed for a more complex kite generating system. Two control algorithms are proposed to implement the optimization process for 4-DOF model and 5-DOF model respectively. Numerical simulations are performed to test the control performance in Simulink.