Flight through Narrow Gaps with Morphing-Wing Drones

TL;DR

This paper presents a control strategy for a morphing-wing drone inspired by birds, enabling it to pass through gaps narrower than its wingspan by dynamically sweeping its wings mid-flight.

Contribution

The authors develop an aerodynamic model and an optimal control framework for a morphing-wing drone, demonstrating successful narrow-gap traversal with precise control and lift compensation.

Findings

Achieved gap passage with 5 cm altitude error at 5-7 m/s speed.

Validated control method on a 130 g drone with wing-sweep morphing.

Drone compensates lift loss by adjusting pitch and speed during gap crossing.

Abstract

The size of a narrow gap traversable by a fixed-wing drone is limited by its wingspan. Inspired by birds, here, we enable the traversal of a gap of sub-wingspan width and height using a morphing-wing drone capable of temporarily sweeping in its wings mid-flight. This maneuver poses control challenges due to sudden lift loss during gap-passage at low flight speeds and the need for precisely timed wing-sweep actuation ahead of the gap. To address these challenges, we first develop an aerodynamic model for general wing-sweep morphing drone flight including low flight speeds and post-stall angles of attack. We integrate longitudinal drone dynamics into an optimal reference trajectory generation and Nonlinear Model Predictive Control framework with runtime adaptive costs and constraints. Validated on a 130 g wing-sweep-morphing drone, our method achieves an average altitude error of 5 cm during narrow-gap passage at forward speeds between 5 and 7 m/s, whilst enforcing fully swept wings near the gap across variable threshold distances. Trajectory analysis shows that the drone can compensate for lift loss during gap-passage by accelerating and pitching upwards ahead of the gap to an extent that differs between reference trajectory optimization objectives. We show that our strategy also allows for accurate gap passage on hardware whilst maintaining a constant forward flight speed reference and near-constant altitude.