Unmanned Water-Powered Aerial Vehicles: Theory and Experiments

Water-powered jetpacks have become a well-known recreational product in water theme parks. It requires a large number of skills to operate them. And it is difficult for visitors, particularly for kids and elders, to master these skills in a limited period of time. This paper designed several unmanned water-powered aerial vehicles (UWAVs) to deal with this dilemma. Two types of actuating mechanism are proposed, each of which is applied in different UWAVs. The dynamics of the two types of UWAV is modeled and analyzed. Several UWAV prototypes, including airframes, actuators, controllers with PD algorithm, and inertial sensors, are fabricated. Under the control of the onboard controllers, the prototypes can achieve attitude stabilization. One can use a remote control to drive a prototype to perform specific tasks. The experimental results are provided, and the experimental mission demonstrations show that the UWAVs could be used in recreation as well as other fields, such as fire extinguishing, salvage, fast transportation on water, and underwater detection.