Autonomous Soaring: The Montague Cross-Country Challenge

摘要

A novel method was developed for locating and allowing gliders to stay in thermals (convective updrafts). Thenmethod was applied to a 5 kg, glider, called ALOFT (autonomous locator of thermals), that was entered in the 2008nMontague Cross-Country Challenge held on 13–15 June 2008 inMontague, California. In this competition, remote-ncontrolled gliders in the 5 kg class competed on the basis of speed and distance. ALOFT was the first knownnautonomously soaring aircraft to enter a soaring competition and its entry provided a valuable comparison betweennthe effectiveness of manual soaring and autonomous soaring. ALOFT placed third in the competition in overallnpoints, outperforming manually-flown aircraft in its ability to center and use updrafts, especially at higher altitudesnand in the presence ofwind, to flymore optimal airspeeds, and to fly directly between turn points. The results confirmnthat autonomous soaring is a bona fide engineering subdiscipline,which is expected to be of interest to engineers,whonmight find that this has some utility in the aviation industry.