Planning and Control for a Dynamic Morphing-Wing UAV Using a Vortex Particle Model

TL;DR

This paper introduces a vortex particle model and a model-based controller for a morphing-wing UAV, improving aggressive maneuver performance by accurately capturing unsteady aerodynamics, demonstrated through hardware experiments.

Contribution

It presents a novel vortex particle model for unsteady aerodynamics and integrates it into a control system for morphing-wing UAVs, enabling better performance during dynamic maneuvers.

Findings

Unsteady aerodynamics modeling improves UAV maneuver performance.

Model-based control with vortex particles outperforms quasi-steady approaches.

Hardware experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed method.

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.