Super-twisting control in a Solar Unmanned Aerial Vehicle: Application to Solar Tracking

Renewable energies have been used more commonly over time, mainly used as source of energy for cities or like a main or auxiliary power sources for cars. Moreover the technology needed to produced and used this kind of energy, has reached enough efficiency and weight to be incorporated into the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV), especially the solar energy. However, it is necessary to solve some challenges to integrate the technology needed to used the solar energy, with the final objective of increasing the autonomy in this vehicle.Most of the problems has been solve, with some special constructions techniques or electronic boards designed for this purpose, in order to add the less weight possible but giving the UAV more energy and consequently more autonomy. Nevertheless, it can still do some research to increase the total energy produced along a day, one of them is taking into account the solar tracking procedure used in the solar panel fixed to the ground.The present paper show the design of a robust control over the roll angle, used to imitate the solar tracking procedure mentioned above, with a solar panel placed on the wing of a Solar Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(SUAV), with the main objective of generated the largest amount of solar energy, to continue with the effort to make more efficient systems. The control will set an appropriate roll angle to ensure the highest energy production depending on the position of the sun, using a control technique based on super-twisting, to ensures the convergence in finite time to a desired position under bounded external perturbations such as wind gusts. Only the design of the control and the results of the simulation are shown to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm.