Performance analysis and actuation mechanism selection of Albatross-inspired wing shape for tilt-wing drones

摘要

There is currently a growing interest in the area of tilt-wing drones for their forward and hovering flight capabilities. Current research and previous designs focus on these systems to be in the larger UAV size category. Therefore, to expand their applications, research in smaller sizes of these systems should be studied, namely, in the micro-unmanned air vehicle (μ,UAV) and micro air vehicle (MAV) categories. The novelty of this research is to design a tilt-wing system through a series of proposed methods and studies. In addition, the implementation of using the biologically inspired wing profile of the Wandering Albatross is used as the wing shape of this system. The idea behind this is to improve the flight characteristics of drones by studying natural flying organisms. In continuation from previous work the characteristics of the Albatross is known, a 3D analysis is performed for the two different categories MAV and U.UAV to determine the optimal aspect ratio for the design of the tilt-wing drone in their respective sizes and compared. This is an addition to the sizing process previously proposed. Finally, a stability analysis and comparative study of the actuation mechanism is carried out.