Achieving the long-endurance of a solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicle is difficult under a limited amount of energy and specific meteorological environments. Therefore, it is essential to manage the energy used by a solar-powered UAV during a mission. In this paper, a framework for energy-based path planning for a solar-powered UAV is presented. In order to generate the optimal path in terms of energy in a specific meteorological environment, the energy model of a solar-powered UAV is considered with regard to wind field. Additionally, the optimal energy path is examined through the optimal control technique. The optimal path is then applied to some case studies regarding solar-powered UAVs, and evaluated in order to verify the feasibility of the proposed approach. The optimization results show that the resulting path is indeed the optimal path, which increases the endurance of a flight and takes weather conditions into accounts. The proposed approach is also expected to find optimal paths in accordance with real weather environments and/or various weather situations.

中文翻译：

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太阳能无人机在风场中使用直接搭配的飞行路径规划

在有限的能量和特定的气象环境下，实现太阳能无人机的长航时是很困难的。因此，管理太阳能无人机在执行任务期间使用的能量至关重要。在本文中，提出了一种基于能量的太阳能无人机路径规划框架。为了在特定的气象环境中产生能量方面的最优路径，太阳能无人机的能量模型考虑了风场。此外，通过最佳控制技术检查最佳能量路径。然后将最佳路径应用于有关太阳能无人机的一些案例研究，并进行评估以验证所提出方法的可行性。优化结果表明，得到的路径确实是最优路径，这增加了飞行的耐力并考虑了天气条件。所提出的方法也有望根据真实天气环境和/或各种天气情况找到最佳路径。