Energy Management Strategy for Fuel Cell Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Integrating Dynamic Programming with Model Predictive Control
Quan Rui1, Liu Dazhi1, Guan Xin1, Zhang Guoguang1, Quan Jin2
1. Hubei Key Laboratory for High-Efficiency Utilization of Solar Energy and Operation Control of Energy Storage System Hubei University of Technology Wuhan 430068 China; 2. Wuhan Hyvitech Co. Ltd Wuhan 430000 China
Abstract:With the low altitude economy being incorporated into the national strategic emerging industry system, fuel cell unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become the core technology direction to break through the bottleneck of lithium battery range due to their high energy density, zero carbon emission, and long-rangecharacteristics. However, the existing energy management strategies (EMSs) have contradictions between real-time and global optimization performance: rule-based methods (e.g., PID) are difficult to adapt to dynamic working conditions, the UAV′s arithmetic resources limit deep reinforcement learning strategies, and optimization-based methods (e.g., dynamic programming) are globally optimal, but with high computational complexity, and cannot be applied in real-time. There is an urgent need for an EMSs that strike a balance between real-time performance and economic efficiency. Aiming at the challenge of fuel cell UAVs, such as high running cost and short fuel cell life, a real-time EMS integrating dynamic programming (DP) and model predictive control (MPC) is proposed, which aims to reduce the equivalent hydrogen consumption, extend the life of the powertrain system, and improve the operation time through multi-objective optimization. Firstly, a Markov predictor that can predict the future demand power is formed by cyclic indexing and updating the constructed state transfer matrix (STM) row by row, using data from typical flight conditions of the UAV. Then, it predicts the UAV demand power in real time according to the constructed Markov predictor and rationally allocates the energy of the lithium battery and fuel cell in combination with the powertrain configuration of the hydrogen-energy UAV. During system operation, the proposedcost function is used to quantify the running cost of each time step within the prediction step. The DP algorithm is used to obtain the short-term optimal power allocation sequence, and then the first element is applied to the fuel cell UAV powertrain. Rolling optimization is carried out according to the same method within the next prediction step, aimingto achieve the lowest running cost in the entire operation process.The following conclusions can be drawn from the results: (1) After comparing the state transfer probability distribution characteristics of different step lengths, it is found that with the increase of the prediction step length, when the prediction step length is less than 3, the state probability distribution shows more obvious diagonal distribution characteristics, when the prediction step length is more than 5, the probability distribution under the state transfer matrix no longer shows obvious diagonal aggregation characteristics, and finally Np = 5 is selected as the prediction step length. (2) By analyzing the probability distribution of fuel cell output power, the DP-MPC strategy has the highest percentage of operating points in the efficient interval of the fuel cell of 85.43%, which is 11.2%, 61.5% and 49.9% higher than MPC, ECMS, and SMC. Meanwhile, the DP-MPC strategy has the highest entire efficiency of 83.46%, which is improved by 13.41%, 16.74% and 12.23% compared to MPC, ECMS, and SMC, respectively. (3) Based on the cost analysis, it is found that the DP-MPC-based EMS proposed in this paper can effectively reduce the total running cost of the UAV by 0.71%, 6.12% and 1.01% compared to MPC, ECMS, and SMC, respectively, and the operation time is improved by 5.39%, 13.62% and 3.05%.
全睿, 刘大志, 管鑫, 章国光, 全琎. 融合动态规划与模型预测控制的燃料电池无人机能量管理策略[J]. 电工技术学报, 2026, 41(14): 5003-5016.
Quan Rui, Liu Dazhi, Guan Xin, Zhang Guoguang, Quan Jin. Energy Management Strategy for Fuel Cell Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Integrating Dynamic Programming with Model Predictive Control. Transactions of China Electrotechnical Society, 2026, 41(14): 5003-5016.
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