Modeling and Control of an Aeroelastic Morphing Vehicle

Morphing aircraft are conceived as multirole platforms that modify their external shape substantially to adapt to a changing mission environment. The dynamic response of the unmanned aerial vehicle will be governed by the time-varying aerodynamic forces and moments which will be a function of the wing's shape changes by the morphing command. 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 the aeroelastic morphing unmanned aerial vehicle concept is formulated to provide both proven structural and self-scheduled characteristics. The proposed controller uses a set of inner-loop gains to provide stability using classical techniques, whereas a linear parameter-varying outer-loop controller is devised to guarantee a specitic level of robust stability and performance for the time-varying dynamics. Reduced-order controllers are synthesized using a robust control reduction technique. A series of maneuvers are devised to exhaustively evaluate the performance of the synthesized multiloop controller subject to large-scale geometrical shape changes. The underlying multiloop approach successfully enables in-flight transformation between vehicle states in less than one minute, while maintaining the overall vehicle stability and control.