  Airborne wind energy is a new renewable technology that promises to deliver
electricity at low costs and in large quantities. Despite the steadily growing
interest in this field, very limited results with real-world data have been
reported so far, due to the difficulty faced by researchers when realizing an
experimental setup. Indeed airborne wind energy prototypes are mechatronic
devices involving many multidisciplinary aspects, for which there are currently
no established design guidelines. With the aim of making research in airborne
wind energy accessible to a larger number of researchers, this work provides
such guidelines for a small-scale prototype. The considered system has no
energy generation capabilities, but it can be realized at low costs, used with
little restrictions and it allows one to test many aspects of the technology,
from sensors to actuators to wing design and materials. In addition to the
guidelines, the paper provides the details of the design and costs of an
experimental setup realized at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and
successfully used to develop and test sensor fusion and automatic control
solutions.
