Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly attracting investment and development attention from many countries all over the world due to their great advantages. However, one of the biggest challenges for researchers is the problem of supplying energy to UAVs to ensure they can operate for a longer time. Especially in the case of rotary wings, they consume more energy than other UAV types as the motors need to spend a lot of energy to operate in order to overcome the gravity of the earth. The article aims to research power supply, energy consumption on UAVs, and a method of taking advantage of external energy sources to provide power for the operation of UAVs and discuss UAVs’ structure, categories, and control. Two experiments were conducted separately to evaluate the energy consumption of UAVs and the energy conversion from external energy sources to electrical energy. A test bench was designed to evaluate and determine the maximum efficiency using regenerative braking mode. The measuring device was manufactured to measure the necessary parameters to calculate the energy consumption and performance of the system. Experimental numerical results show that energy conversion from external sources is one of methods that can help increase the flight time of the UAV.

In recent decades, the trend of using zero-emission vehicles has been constantly evolving. This trend brings about not only the pressure to develop electric vehicles (EVs) or hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) but also the demand for further developments in battery technologies and safe use of battery systems. Concerning the safe usage of battery systems, Battery Management Systems (BMS) play one of the most important roles. A BMS is used to monitor operating temperature and State of Charge (SoC), as well as protect the battery system against cell imbalance. The paper aims to present hardware and software designs of a BMS for unmanned EVs, which use Lithium multi-cell battery packs. For higher modularity, the designed BMS uses a distributed topology and contains a master module with more slave modules. Each slave module is in charge of monitoring and protecting a multi-cell battery pack. All information about the state of each battery pack is sent to the master module which saves and sends all data to the control station if required. Controlled Area Network (CAN) bus and Internet of Things technologies are designed for requirements from different applications for communications between slave modules and the master module, and between the master module and control station.

Detecting the structural integrity of composite material used in an airframe includes passive non-destructive testing (NDT) and active electrical impendence tomography (EIT). EIT benefits enhance real-time response and accuracy but require pragmatic approaches to analysis of electrode errors from faulty or non-responsive readings. Non-functional connections of measuring electrodes often occur during onboard aircraft operations for various reasons such as deterioration. The deterioration of the electrode impedance impacts the quality of the EIT reconstructed image. The paper compares different EIT methods and proposes SURface Fault EIT (SURFEIT). The proposed SURFEIT techniques that detect and compensate for faults are verified and evaluated using models with different location of inside damages. Results prove the effectiveness of SURFEIT techniques, when the number of faulty electrodes is up to one-fourth of the total electrodes. The biggest benefit of the SURFEIT techniques is that they do not require any additional simulation work, lead to significant reduction of computation time, and afford very fast indications of damage locations.

This paper deals with the analyses of batteries used in current military systems to power the electric drives of military vehicles. The article focuses on battery analyses based on operational data obtained from measurements rather than analyses of the chemical composition of the tested batteries. The authors of the article used their experience from the development test-laboratory of military technology. This article presents a comparative analysis of existing and promising technologies in the field of energy storage and buffering for military electric vehicles. The overview of these technologies, including the design, operating principles, advantages, and disadvantages, are briefly presented to produce theoretical comparative analyses. However, this article mainly focuses on the experimental verification of operational ability in varied conditions, as well as the comparison and analysis of these results. The main part of the article provides more experimental studies on technologies of energy storage and buffering using the results of several experiments conducted to demonstrate the behavior of each technology in different working conditions. The output parameters, as well as the state of charge of each technology’s samples, were surveyed in various temperatures and loading characteristics. The results presented in this paper are expected to be useful for optimizing the selection of energy storage and buffering solutions for military electric vehicles in different applications and functional environments.

This paper deals with designing and implementing a battery management system (BMS) for autonomous devices, using batteries as the power source. BMSs are now available in packaged form as an integrated chip. However, these chips are often expensive and unavailable in Vietnam and the Czech markets. Besides, their ability to integrate custom functions, especially function wireless communication between BMS and workstation, is limited. In practice, monitoring the state of the battery during the device’s operation is very important to devise a suitable operating tactic. This work aims to design a system that can measure and estimate the parameters of several batteries in an unmanned autonomous device, and send the measured data to the workstation by using technology Internet of Things for monitoring and analysis during the device’s operation.

This paper aims to introduce a design of a COTS system that uses available components to monitor UAV’s accumulators. These accumulators can measure important parameters to analyze and prediction operation of an accumulator system. Besides, they can transmit the data to a computer with the help of the technology IoT. This COTS system will be administered by the microcontroller ESP-32, which connects the system and the computer.