SimpleKiteControllers

Introduction

This package shall (in the beginning) provide two controllers:

• a parking controller, that keeps the nose of the kite pointing into the wind and thus keeps it in a steady state airborne as long as their is sufficient wind
• a path following figure of eight controller for pulling ships

All controllers shall come with an auto-tuning script for tuning the controller parameters for new kites. It might be necessary to run this script for different wind speeds and to create a lookup table that adapts the controller parameters to the wind speed.

The auto-tuning script shall optimize the controller performance in the time domain, using a cost function similar to these Performance Indicators. In addition a linearized model shall be used to quantify the stability using the diskmargin.

This package provides

• the types ParkingController and ParkingControllerSettings
• the functions linearize, calc_steering, navigate

Installation

Installation of Julia

If you do not have Julia installed yet, please read Installation.

Installation as package

Installation of SimpleKiteControllers as package

It is suggested to use a local Julia environment. You can create it with:

mkdir myproject
cd myproject
julia --project=.

(don't forget typing the dot at the end), and then, on the Julia prompt enter:

using Pkg
pkg"add https://github.com/OpenSourceAWE/SimpleKiteControllers.jl"

You can run the tests with:

using Pkg
pkg"test SimpleKiteControllers"

TODO

• add examples for using the parking controller
• implement a new path following controller for flying figures of eight, see Fernandes_2022

Related

A fully working set of flight path controllers and planners can be found here: KiteControllers.jl