Robust Trajectory Optimization for Dynamic Soaring

Robust and optimal trajectories are computed for a dynamic soaring unmanned aerial vehicle. Dynamic soaring is technique for extracting energy from atmospheric wind gradients that large seabirds such as the albatross use as their primary means of propulsive power. The stochastic nature of the soaring problem is explicitly included in the optimization formulation by using an uncertainty quantication technique known as stochastic collocation. This non-intrusive method can generate accurate estimates of solution statistics with signicantly fewer samples than a Monte Carlo based approach. An analysis of variance is rst performed to determine which environmental parameters, aircraft properties, and initial conditions contribute most to nal energy and altitude variance. Robust dynamic soaring trajectories are then computed by using stochastic collocation over carefully chosen nested sparse grids.