Modeling and Flight Testing of Wing Shaping for Autonomous Control

摘要

UAV development and usage has increased dramatically in the last 15 years. In this time frame the potential has been realized for deployable UAVs to the extent that a new class of UAV was defined for these systems. Inflatable wing UAVs provide a unique solution for deployable UAVs because they are highly packable (some packing to 5-10% of their deployed volume) and have the potential for the incorporation of wing shaping. In this paper, aileron effectiveness was derived from the equations of motion of aircraft as a necessary parameter for roll control during autonomous flight. A modeling process was then developed to calculate the aileron effectiveness of a wing shaping demonstrator aircraft. Successful autonomous flight tests were performed with the demonstrator aircraft including in-flight aileron doublets to validate the predicted aileron effectiveness, which matched within 8%.