Smooth free-cycle dynamic soaring in unspecified shear wind via quadratic programming

Harvesting wind energy is promising for extending long-endurance flights, which can be greatly facilitated by a flight technique called dynamic soaring. The presented study is concerned with generating model-based trajectories with smooth control histories for dynamic soaring maneuvers exploiting wind gradients. The desired smoothness is achieved by introducing a trigonometric series parameterization for the controls, which are formulated with respect to the normalized time.Specifically, the per...