Crosswind Flight Control of an Airborne Wind Energy Kite

This work highlights a practical flight control framework for tethered kite systems to achieve optimized crosswind flight. A two-waypoint path tracking scheme, aided by adaptive turning controllers, was developed to perform robust figure-8 flights for Toyota’s Airborne Wind Energy (AWE) kite. The algorithm was simulated using a flight dynamic model and further validated through flight tests on a small-scale proof-of-concept (POC) kite. The preliminary results demonstrate the efficacy of accomplishing a smooth figure-8 trajectory, laying the foundation for incorporating the velocity-based wind-adaptive path planner to maintain long-endurance power generation flights for the kite system.