Robust Optimal Design and Control of a Morphing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) Airfoil for a Range of Flight Maneuvers

This paper presents a new approach to optimizing the designs of a morphing airfoil for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) by accounting for the range of possible flight trajectories that the UAV is required to be able to fly. A morphing mechanism and control system for the airfoil are simultaneously optimized in order to maximize how well the UAV can follow different flight trajectories. In order to solve the resulting concurrent optimization problem, a new solution approach incorporating robust optimization (a method for optimization under uncertainty) is proposed, which accounts for a continuous range of possible flight trajectories. This method determines the set of “worst-case” trajectories and finds a design that is optimal under them (thus ensuring better performance under any other trajectory). Results are presented comparing the robust design found using the proposed approach against designs that have only been optimized for one specific trajectory. The results show the robust design found using the proposed approach has significantly better performance over the set of worst-case trajectories than designs optimized for a single flight trajectory, guaranteeing a bound on its performance under any randomly sampled trajectory.