Practical Modeling, Control and Simulation of an Aeroelastic Morphing UAV

DARÍO BALDELLI; RICARDO S. SÁNCHEZ PEÑA; DENNIS HOPPER; BRYAN CANNON

Hawaii

Conferencia; 48th AIAA/ASME/ASCE/AHS/ACS Structures Structural Dynamics and Materials Conference; 2007

AIAA/ASME/ASCE/AHS/ACS

Morphing aircraft are conceived as multirole platforms that modify their external shape substantially to adapt to achanging mission environment. The dynamic response of the unmanned aerial vehicle will be governed by the timevaryingaerodynamic forces and moments which will be a function of the wing?s shape changes by the morphingcommand. Here, it is assumed that the morphing unmanned aerial vehicle behaves as a variable geometry rigid body,but with dynamic coefficients corrected to include quasi-steady aeroelastic effects. A multiloop controller for theaeroelastic morphing unmanned aerial vehicle concept is formulated to provide both proven structural and selfscheduledcharacteristics. The proposed controller uses a set of inner-loop gains to provide stability using classicaltechniques, whereas a linear parameter-varying outer-loop controller is devised to guarantee a specific level of robuststability and performance for the time-varying dynamics. Reduced-order controllers are synthesized using a robustcontrol reduction technique. A series of maneuvers are devised to exhaustively evaluate the performance of thesynthesized multiloop controller subject to large-scale geometrical shape changes. The underlying multiloopapproach successfully enables in-flight transformation between vehicle states in less than one minute, whilemaintaining the overall vehicle stability and control.