Flight evaluation of solar powered unmanned flying vehicle using ground testbed

Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are applied to various fields, and the demand of UAV has also been increased. Achieving long endurance of a UAV is very important to perform a variety of tasks. A solar UAV is the one way for long endurance. However, there is damage or loss of solar UAV for the flight test. In this study, the ground testbed is designed for replicating flight motion of the solar powered unmanned flying vehicle (UFV) on the ground to minimize the practical constraints. The testbed evaluates the performance of the main parts such as solar module, MPPT, battery packs and verifies the feasibility of the long endurance flight. The evaluation system can monitor the energy flow by the measurement of the energy production and the consumption according to flight motion. And the experiment result was compared with the flight simulation using MATLAB for validation.