Attitude tracking control of an Airborne Wind Energy system

We study the control of an Airborne Wind Energy (AWE) system where a turbine is mounted on a rigid glider (or kite) with a fixed length tether connected between the kite center of gravity (CG) and the ground. The turbine on the kite in an AWE system extracts wind power in a high speed cross wind motion to efficiently harness energy. The model incorporates the full aircraft and inverted pendulum dynamics and results in an under-actuated and coupled system. In this paper, we discuss translation related velocity angles, which can be used to link the translational and rotational motion. A Lyapunov based nonlinear controller is designed to achieve a desired kite attitude trajectory for tracking a constant angle of attack. A baseline simulation of several successive power generation figure-eight cycles is presented.