A Nonlinear Adaptive Controller for Airborne Wind Energy Systems

A nonlinear adaptive path following controller for a kite based airborne wind energy system is presented. For a given desired geometric path, we provide necessary conditions for closed-loop convergence of the kite to a tube centered around the desired path. The proposed controller adapts for the case of unknown wind vector and kite parameters. The effectiveness of the approach is demonstrated via numerical simulations for multiple desired shapes of the geometric path and for varying desired tether length references.