Abstract: For the needs of UAV in agriculture field, limited battery life is undoubtedly one of the important issues facing the plant protection unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). Due to the bottleneck in battery producing technology, the effective operating time of plant protection UAV is mostly limited to about 12 min which is difficult to break through. As an inexhaustible “non source” power, the sun has gained special attention. This paper designed a scheme for flight duration of plant protection UAV based on solar energy. Feasibility of this scheme was tested on the six rotor UAV platform. The results showed that the flight life time of UAV installed on solar module was averagely increased 70 s compared with that before the installation. This design based on multi-axis UAV flight platform, which converted the solar energy into electricity to charge lithium batteries during UAV flight, thereby reducing the lithium battery consumption, and prolonging the effective operating time of the plant protection UAV. To a certain extent, it alleviated the problem existing in current unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), and could be extend to application of other platforms based on the UAV.

Key words: plant protection unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), battery life, solar energy, lithium battery

摘要： 在农业领域对无人机的任务需求中，续航问题无疑是目前植保无人机所面临的重要问题之一。由于电池生产技术的瓶颈，目前植保无人机的有效作业时间大都被限制在12 min左右难以突破。太阳作为一个取之不尽用之不竭的“无源”动力得到了特别的关注，因此设计了一种基于太阳能的植保无人机续航提升方案。在六旋翼无人机平台上对方案的可行性进行实验，结果表明，安装了太阳能续航模块后的无人机相比安装前，飞行续航时间平均提升了70 s。该方案基于多轴无人机飞行平台，在无人机工作时将太阳能转化为电能为锂电池续电，从而减少锂电池在飞行时的电量消耗，增加植保无人机的有效作业时间，在一定程度上缓解了当前植保无人机的续航问题，并能够向其他基于无人机平台的应用延伸。

关键词: 植保无人机, 续航, 太阳能, 锂电池