STARKVILLE — An albatross is a bird known for flying in wind currents and other weather conditions for thousands of miles without having to flap its wings.
Could that same method of flight also be used to reduce the energy needed for planes?
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Albatross program, which is being led by faculty of different research areas from Mississippi State University, is working to answer that question. The multi-university program also includes faculty from the University of Texas at El Paso and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.
“Every time you design an airplane or a system, you’re trying to optimize,” said Raspet’s Principle Investigator Matthew Berk. “And essentially this project is, what if we can use these natural sources of energy in the atmosphere to extend this range and endurance, and rather than getting a few percent of improvement from a slightly better engine … you can get 50 or 75% reduction in energy usage for doing the same mission just by intelligently planning the flight.”
The program, which started at MSU’s Raspet Flight Research Laboratory in May, aims to develop algorithms in smaller unmanned, fixed-wing planes that locate specific conditions like wind and turbulence for the aircraft to take advantage of during flights, Berk said, thus using less energy.
Jamie Dyer, a professor of meteorology and climatology, has been working with Earthcast Technologies to develop the weather modeling system which helps identify flight paths with turbulence.
It’s a big difference from commercial flights, which typically seek to avoid turbulence, Dyer said.
“What most pilots would want to try to avoid, especially commercial pilots, we’re trying to find, and we want to find those very, very small scale features that numerical weather models traditionally have struggled to predict,” Dyer said. “… It’s an interesting approach, and … it’s a challenge, both from the engineering but also from the meteorology side, which makes it exciting.”
Weather modeling was one of the first systems to be developed in the program and it is projected to be wrapped up by the end of the month with continued minor tweaks being made as the development process continues, Dyer said.
Christopher Goodin, an associate research professor with MSU’s Center for Advanced Vehicular Systems, has been leading a group of six other researchers developing cameras, radar and LiDAR sensors, which emit rotating laser beams to determine the range between objects, for the project.
Goodin’s team has had a tricky time in developing the systems because the project is looking to have aircraft fly largely over water, which is more difficult to sense than solid surfaces like how other automated sensing tools in cars have functioned, Goodin said.
“What we’re doing is taking an approach … to grab all different types of sensors and see if some combination of (cameras, radar and LiDAR) can give us the information that we need,” Goodin said. “And then, taking sort of more sophisticated approaches to combine different readings into one sort of output.”
The next steps include both teams integrating the weather and perception systems to begin evaluating and readjusting based on trials over the next two years.
“If we find success in this, then the application of these sorts of techniques and algorithms has the potential to … either greatly increase the performance of a lot of existing vehicles … or you can say that it decreases their energy usage,” Berk said.
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