POTION Can Reduce Aircraft Fuel Consumption

U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) and Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) co-developed a Path OptimizaTION (POTION) tactical decision aid to assist UAV operators with mission planning and situational awareness. Watch this video to learn more.

Transcript

00:00:05 uh dead horse is a wonderful place to go fly uh we're up in the Arctic there aren't a lot of other aircraft so we're able to get permissions to fly uh interesting routes up here uh it's also very interesting weather so the optimization algorithms have some interesting uh weather conditions to work through so today we are uh testing and

00:00:27 demonstrating software that we developed NRL in collaboration with our partners L naal Postgraduate School platform airspace and are sponsor the operational energy prototyping fund so the goal today is to show that the software we've developed reduces the fuel consumption of this aircraft enabling longer time on station when executing emission flying vanilla with some algorithms from NRL

00:00:50 and partners vanilla is a very long endurance aircraft and what we're doing is trying to extend its Mission persistent so we're testing those algorithms together so the way potion works is we take the weather forecast and an energy model of the vehicle and we effectively simulate the vehicle flying through that weather forecast to find the optimal trajectory the

00:01:13 trajectory being not just the path the aircraft will follow but also when the aircraft you arrive at each point along that path fuel efficiency is one of the fundamental limitations across all autonomous systems uh not only used by DOD but in in our social life regardless of of the uh state-of-the-art of the platform every system has its own finite metric so scagle can operate 20 plus

00:01:40 hours another aircraft can operate 18 hours Puma can operate 4 hours solar version of Puma can operate 8 hours the point here is that every system has a number associated with it what we are trying to do by trying to extend that numbers not by redesigning a system but by redesigning a software the system that will be flown like vanilla Remains the Same we're adding

00:02:05 new software and we increase capabilities of the system by a number and this is uh very important so if you're on man aircraft operator you're sitting at your ground control station in front of the software you used to operate the aircraft generally potion will be sitting alongside that you access it through a web browser so that web browser can be running on the

00:02:26 same computer and then the operator will input the the location they want to fly to and potion will pull the latest weather forecast and then generate the optimal trajectory the user can then download the flight plan corresponding to that op optimal trajectory and then import that into the ground control station software that used to operate the aircraft um and execute it so

00:02:49 vanilla's capabilities are an 8-day endurance that we've demonstrated it's a very long endurance uh world record in fact um what's important though is is putting that persistence out on Mission so potion is helping provide the optimization to put that persistance put that endurance out where it matters most so potion doesn't control the aircraft it makes a

00:03:14 recommendation to the operator and so what we've tried to do is create a seamless process where the operator can request a recommended uh trajectory from potion which is then available to them and they can either choose to execute that optimal trajectory or not portion in uh simulation in Hardware Loop simulations that include pieces of Hardware demonstrates promises to reduce

00:03:35 fuel consumption by 15 to 20% and those numbers are seasonal depending on the region and depending on the season uh these numbers will vary but adding 20% to the existing endurance of Manila is a huge number in terms of operational and Mission management perspective so after the potion program we have another program Plan called gider and in guer we're going to take a we didn't potion

00:04:01 and extend it by implementing features that automatically route the airplane around regions we don't want to fly through we're also adding a couple of features to do things that are really focused on Mission execution rather than just getting somewhere efficiently and so with these new features layered on top of the base capability we're demonstrating here in Alaska I think

00:04:20 that we'll have a very useful tool for the do