Energy-Efficiency Path Planning for Quadrotor UAV Under Wind Conditions

Quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles have a limited quantity of embedded energy. To preserve and guaranty the success of the UAV mission, we should manage energy consumption during the mission. In this study, we introduce an optimization algorithm to minimize the consumed energy in the flying vehicle mission under windy conditions. In order to calculate the energy consumed by the quadrotor, we present a power loss model, where the energy is formulated as a function of rotor speed and acceleration. Then, we formulate the energy minimization problem as an optimal control problem and solve this problem in order to calculate minimum energy for a point-to-point quadrotor mission under windy conditions. In order to highlight the proposed optimization approach, we compare energy consumption obtained by optimization algorithm with an adaptive control approach in simulation experiment.