When most autonomous sailplanes are launched into the air with a ground-based catapult, they return to the ground in just a few minutes. Now, researchers at the Naval Research Laboratory at the Phillips Army Airfield in Maryland, USA, have developed special software to keep the sailplanes in the air for hours at a time. The software, known as ALOFT, which stands for Autonomous Locator of Thermals, was developed by Dr. Dan Edwards. His team tested and launched more than 20 flights with the software last October. The total duration of those flights was more than 30 hours, proving that using algorithms to update data on thermals can help unmanned sailplanes fly much longer than previously thought possible.
The researchers based their algorithm on what birds do naturally – find and use thermals or rising hot air to stay in the air with very little effort. “The biggest challenge for autonomous soaring is teasing out the skills that a soaring pilot uses into an algorithm that an autopilot can follow,” says Edwards. “We have spent many hours watching the auto-soaring algorithm work, but behave not quite the way that makes the most sense, only then to return to the computer and tweak the programming.”
To learn more about this program, please check out this article.
http://www.popsci.com/new-software-lets-drones-surf-winds-for-hours
