Tethered Vehicle Control and Tracking System

NASA’s Langley Research Center has developed hardware and software to track the flight of tethered vehicles, including kite-like, airborne wind energy (AWE) generation systems. The control system consists of a pan-tilt platform and a visible-spectrum digital camera, combined with tracking control software running on a standard PC. The system controls the flight of the vehicle to keep its position on a power-producing trajectory, maximizing velocity (but within limits). This trajectory produces tension, which turns the ground-based generator, producing the energy. The NASA system enables effective operation of groundgen or flygen types of AWE systems. NASA has a working prototype and pre-beta software, and is seeking development partners to make it more robust and user-friendly by testing it in real-world systems.