The Applicability of eVTOLs in Emergency Medical Care in Japan

Background: The present study aims to elucidate the applicability of electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft that dispatch only a doctor to provide a solution to the operational challenges of utilizing a helicopter to transport a doctor to the patient/s, with such physician-staffed emergency medical helicopters being known as doctor heli (DH), in Japan.Methods: This study conducted interviews with 17 parties related to DHs in five prefectures in Japan to depict challenges of DHs and eVTOL requirements. Subsequently, this study analyzed the Hokusoh DH flight data, as an example, in terms of cases for which flight doctors consider condition assessment and initial treatment provision by a doctor would be particularly effective, to assess the hypothesis that a two-seater is applicable for emergency medical care (EMS) and that eVTOLs help reduce duplicate dispatch requests for DHs as well as the percentage and delayed dispatch time of duplicate requests.Results: Challenges of DHs and eVTOL requirements were identified and classified into six major categories. Data analysis results indicated that two-seater eVTOLs would be particularly effective for trauma, cardiac disease, brain disease cases, and pediatric patient cases and help solve duplicate requests.Conclusions: Two-seater eVTOLs are likely applicable in EMS in Japan.

Energy Efficiency Enhanced Landing Strategy for Manned eVTOLs Using L1 Adaptive Control

A new landing strategy is presented for manned electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) vehicles, using a roll maneuver to obtain a trajectory in the horizontal plane. This strategy rejects the altitude surging in the landing process, which is the fatal drawback of the conventional jumping strategy. The strategy leads to a smoother transition from the wing-borne mode to the thrust-borne mode, and has a higher energy efficiency, meaning a better flight experience and higher economic performance. To employ the strategy, a five-stage maneuver is designed, using the lateral maneuver instead of longitudinal climbing. Additionally, a control system based on L1 adaptive control theory is designed to assist manned driving or execute flight missions independently, consisting of the guidance logic, stability augmentation system and flight management unit. The strategy is verified with the ET120 platform, by Monte Carlo simulation for robustness and safety performance, and an experiment was performed to compare the benefits with conventional landing strategies. The results show that the performance of the control system is robust enough to reduce perturbation by at least 20% in all modeling parameters, and ensures consistent dynamic characteristics between different flight modes. Additionally, the strategy successfully avoids climbing during the landing process with a smooth trajectory, and reduces the energy consumed for landing by 64%.

Power Line Charging Mechanism for Drones

The use of multirotor drones has increased dramatically in the last decade. These days, quadcopters and Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) drones can be found in many applications such as search and rescue, inspection, commercial photography, intelligence, sports, and recreation. One of the major drawbacks of electric multirotor drones is their limited flight time. Commercial drones commonly have about 20–40 min of flight time. The short flight time limits the overall usability of drones in homeland security applications where long-duration performance is required. In this paper, we present a new concept of a “power-line-charging drone”, the idea being to equip existing drones with a robotic mechanism and an onboard charger in order to allow them to land safely on power lines and then charge from the existing 100–250 V AC (50–60 Hz). This research presents several possible conceptual models for power line charging. All suggested solutions were constructed and submitted to a field experiment. Finally, the paper focuses on the optimal solution and presents the performance and possible future development of such power-line-charging drones.