Energy Aware Coverage Planning for a QuadPlane small Uncrewed Aircraft System

This paper describes flight planning for a Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) QuadPlane small Uncrewed Aircraft System (sUAS). Five Lift+Cruise sUAS waypoint types are defined and used to construct smooth flight path geometries and acceleration profiles. Accelerated coverage flight plan segments for hover (Lift) and coverage (Cruise) waypoints are defined. Carrot-chasing guidance shows a trade-off between tracking accuracy and control stability as a function of carrot time step. Experimentally derived QuadPlane aerodynamic and thrust models for vertical, forward, and hybrid flight modes are developed as a function of airspeed and angle of attack. The QuadPlane feedback controller supports a novel hybrid mode that combines multicopter and aircraft actuators to add a controllable pitch degree of freedom at the cost of increased energy use. Energy aware coverage planning results show fly-coverage cruise waypoints are most efficient given long inter-waypoint distances. Energy versus coverage Pareto fronts analyze waypoint type tradeoffs for closely spaced waypoint cases.