Abstract
In recent research works, morphing wings were studied as an interesting field for a small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The previous studies either focused on selecting suitable material for the morphing wings or performing experimental tests on UAVs with morphing wings. Though, the dynamic modeling of active flexible morphing wings and their involved interactions with the aerodynamics of the UAV body are challenging subjects. Using such a model to control a small UAV to perform specific maneuvering is not investigated yet. The dynamic model of UAV with active morphing wings generates a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) system which rises the difficulty of the control system design. In this paper, the aeroelastic dynamic model of morphing wing activated by piezocomposite actuators is established using the finite element method and modal decomposition technique. Then, the dynamic model of the UAV is developed taking into consideration the coupling between the wing and piezocomposite actuators, as well as the dynamic properties of the morphing actuators with the aerodynamic wind disturbances. A model predictive control (MPC) is designed for the MIMO control system to perform specific flight maneuvering by tracking desired trajectories of UAV altitude and yaw angle. Additionally, the MPC achieves constrained behavior of pitch and roll angles to get satisfactory UAV motion. Also, the behaviors of the UAV control system using MPC are evaluated after adding Dryden wind turbulence to the UAV outputs. Finally, a UAV flight simulation is conducted which shows that the control system successfully rejects the applied disturbances and tracks the reference trajectories with acceptable behavior of pitch and roll angles.
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The data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author.
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18 January 2023
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Abbreviations
- AFC:
-
Active Fiber Composite
- AOA:
-
Angle of Attack
- CAD:
-
Computer Aided Design
- CFD:
-
Computational Fluid Dynamics
- DOF:
-
Degree of Freedom
- FE:
-
Finite Element
- FEM:
-
Finite Element Method
- IDE:
-
Interdigitated Electrodes
- MFC:
-
Macro Fiber Composite
- MIMO:
-
Multi Input Multi Output
- MPC:
-
Model Predictive Controller
- UAV:
-
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle
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Open access funding provided by The Science, Technology & Innovation Funding Authority (STDF) in cooperation with The Egyptian Knowledge Bank (EKB). The authors declare that no funds, grants, or other support were received during the preparation of this manuscript.
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Conceptualization, D.E.; methodology, D.E., and M.F.; software, D.E.; validation, D.E., and M.F.; formal analysis, D.E.; writing original draft preparation, D.E.; writing review and editing, M.F. and A.M.; supervision, M.F. and A.M. All authors read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
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Emad, D., Mohamed, A. & Fanni, M. Modeling and Flight Control of Small UAV with Active Morphing Wings. J Intell Robot Syst 106, 42 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-022-01740-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-022-01740-y