ASL's AtlantikSolar UAV breaks world endurance record with 81 hour flight
On Friday, 17 July, the AtlantikSolar team with Philipp Oettershagen, doctoral student in Prof. Roland Siegwart’s team, has broken the world record with his project AtlantikSolar for the longest solar-powered unmanned aerial vehicle flight in its weight category (under 50 kg).
AtlantikSolar
Two weeks after having demonstrated AtlantikSolar’s first 24-hour flight , the fixed-wing team at ETH Zurich’s Autonomous Systems Lab has now achieved a continuous flight of its 6.8kg AtlantikSolar Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) that spanned a total of 2316km and 81.5 hours (4 days and 3 nights) and has broken the flight endurance world record for all UAVs below 50kg total mass. In addition, the fully solar-powered flight is the longest-ever flight of a low-altitude long-endurance (LALE) Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, the second-longest flight among any UAV, and the fifth-longest flight ever shown by any aircraft worldwide. From an applications perspective, the flight proves the central commercially-promising advantage of solar-powered UAVs, i.e. their capability to stay airborne for multiple days while providing telecommunication services in large-scale disaster-scenarios or live-imagery during industrial sensing and inspection missions.