Medium and Low-Level Energy Saving Control Strategies for Electric-Powered UAVs

Flight endurance of an electric-powered Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is restricted by its limited on-board energy, which might endanger the accomplishment of any mission it has been sent on. Therefore, the vehicle’s energy consumption should be reduced as much as possible to prolong its flight. This paper deals with the minimization of the energy consumed by an electric-powered UAV as it tracks a desired target point by designing the necessary energy saving control techniques. Two approaches are proposed. The first one addresses the energy consumption problem by optimizing the UAV’s low-level controller. The second approach makes use of the powerful Artificial Bee Colony algorithm to optimize the medium-level controller which guarantees not only target point tracking but also minimization of energy consumption. The effectiveness of both proposals is validated by simulations on MATLAB/Simulink.