Coordinated High-efficiency Autonomous Recharge and Generation of Energy for Drones (CHARGED)

The Navy faces significant operational challenges in sustaining small unmanned systems at the company level and below. Current drone operations are severely limited by short flight durations (as low as 20 minutes) and long charge cycles (hours), leading to prolonged downtime. Operators must manually swap batteries, carry spares, or halt operations during recharging, creating gaps in mission effectiveness and increased logistical burdens. The U.S. Navy requires a self-sustaining energy management and charging system capable of autonomously maintaining a fleet of 100+ unmanned aerial and ground systems for up to one week without direct human intervention. The increasing reliance on small drones and other unmanned vehicles at the company level and below has introduced significant logistical challenges related to energy sustainment, particularly in austere and contested environments where traditional fuel resupply chains may be compromised.With flight durations as short as 20 minutes but charging cycles lasting several hours, maintaining persistent unmanned operations requires either frequent battery swaps or extended downtime, both of which place an unsustainable burden on operators. The Navy seeks an autonomous power management solution that integrates diverse energy sources, intelligent charge scheduling, and universal charging interfaces to ensure continuous fleet availability without disrupting ongoing missions.ÝTo address these challenges, Stratin Engineering proposes the Coordinated High-efficiency Autonomous Recharge and Generation of Energy for Drones (CHARGED) system to function as a self-sustaining power management and charging hub for distributed unmanned systems. This solution directly supports the Navyís need for a common, self-sustaining energy management system for unmanned platforms to autonomously manage their own charge cycles for up to one week without human intervention. By integrating multi-source hybrid power generation, intelligent charge scheduling, and universal docking/charging interfaces, the system will support continuous drone operations with minimal logistical burden, human involvement, and resupply constraints. This effort will focus on conducting a feasibility study leveraging ONR Code 34ís existing unmanned fleet, utilizing virtual and real-world experimentation to explore system configurations, interfaces, communication protocols, and autonomy software.