Preliminary Architectonic Design for a Smart Solar-Powered UAV

Solar-powered Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have a bright future due to their long-endurance missions. The significance lies in their infinite sunlight energy source. The focus in solar-powered UAV research is moving from low-level control to autonomous UAV decision-level control embedded in sophisticated architectures. This work presents a hierarchical architecture design of an overall solar-powered UAV, needed for the integration of electro-mechanical, low-level control, intelligent control and communication data-link UAV subsystems with hybrid energy technologies: solar cells and batteries. Six layers are proposed and presented for the overall architecture of strategic, autonomous and smart solar-powered unmanned aircraft. These layers are: solar-power supply, user interface, data-link, low-level abstraction, physical, and intelligent control.