Late Breaking Results: Thermal-Aware Drone Battery Management

Abstract

Users have reported that their drones unexpectedly shutoff even when they show more than 10% remaining battery capacity. We discovered that the causes of these unexpected shutoffs to be significant thermal degradation of a cell caused by thermal coupling between the drones and their battery cells. This causes a large voltage drop for the cell affected by the drone heat dissipation, which leads to low supply voltage and unexpected shutoffs. This paper describes the design and implementation of a thermal and battery aware power management framework designed specifically for drones. Our framework provides an accurate state-of-charge and state-of-power estimation for individual battery cells by accounting for their different thermal degradation. We have implemented our framework on commodity drones without additional hardware or system modification. We have evaluated its effectiveness using three different batteries demonstrating our framework generates accurate state-of-charge and prevents unexpected shutoffs.