Design and Trajectory Planning Optimization of a Morphing Airfoil for 3-D Flight Maneuvers
Eliot Rudnick-Cohen, Joshua D. Hodson, Gregory W. Reich, Alexander M. Pankonien, Philip Beran · AIAA Scitech 2021 Forum · 2021
View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2021-0890.vid This paper presents a new approach for simultaneously optimizing the design and flight trajectories of a morphing wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). A new strategy for coupling a motion planning problem with a design optimization problem is presented, which leverages sampling based motion planning techniques. A set of motion primitives are also presented that can be used to generate candidate feasible trajectories for morphing wing aircraft. The new strategy will be tested on a multi-objective morphing wing UAV design and motion planning optimization problem, where the objectives considered represent the minimum time to fly between different flight states. Results are presented demonstrating that the proposed approach can produce optimal morphing wing UAV designs with different maneuverability characteristics.