Planning and Control for a Dynamic Morphing-Wing UAV Using a Vortex Particle Model
Abstract
Achieving precise, highly-dynamic maneuvers with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is a major challenge due to the complexity of the associated aerodynamics. In particular, unsteady effects -- as might be experienced in post-stall regimes or during sudden vehicle morphing -- can have an adverse impact on the performance of modern flight control systems. In this paper, we present a vortex particle model and associated model-based controller capable of reasoning about the unsteady aerodynamics during aggressive maneuvers. We evaluate our approach in hardware on a morphing-wing UAV executing post-stall perching maneuvers. Our results show that the use of the unsteady aerodynamics model improves performance during both fixed-wing and dynamic-wing perching, while the use of wing-morphing planned with quasi-steady aerodynamics results in reduced performance. While the focus of this paper is a pre-computed control policy, we believe that, with sufficient computational resources, our approach could enable online planning in the future.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2307.02371,
title = {Planning and Control for a Dynamic Morphing-Wing UAV Using a Vortex Particle Model},
author = {Gino Perrotta and Luca Scheuer and Yocheved Kopel and Max Basescu and Adam Polevoy and Kevin Wolfe and Joseph Moore},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.02371},
year = {2023}
}