Morphing unmanned aerial vehicles

Abstract

Research on aircraft morphing has exploded in recent years. The motivation and driving force behind this has been to find new and novel ways to increase the capabilities of aircraft. Materials advancements have helped to increase possibilities with respect to actuation and, hence, a diversity of concepts and unimagined capabilities. The expanded role of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has provided an ideal platform for exploring these emergent morphing concepts since at this scale a greater amount of risk can be taken, as well as having more manageable fabrication and cost requirements. This review focuses on presenting the role UAVs have in morphing research by giving an overview of the UAV morphing concepts, designs, and technologies described in the literature. A presentation of quantitative information as well as a discussion of technical issues is given where possible to begin gaining some insight into the overall assessment and performance of these technologies.

Inertial attitude control of a bat-like morphing-wing air vehicle

“…In recent years, the concept of morphing Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) has gained interest [1], [2], [3]. The possibility of having actuated wings has allowed the design of new mechanisms that improve over classical fixed/rotary-wings MAV flight performance.…”

One Dimensional Morphing Structures for Advanced Aircraft

“…In fact, the development of a new generation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), combined with advances in actuator and materials technology, has spawned renewed interest in radical morphing configurations capable of matching multiple mission profiles through shape change -this class has come to be referred to as "morphing aircraft" (Barbarino et al, 2011). Gomez and Garcia (2011) presented a comprehensive review of morphing UAVs. Contemporary research is primarily dedicated to various conformal changes, namely, twist, camber, span, and sweep.…”

Morphed Vertical Tailplane Assessment for Certification Requirements

“…There are other studies to provide different morphing solutions for flapped airfoils for noise reduction [23]. The study of shape-morphing adaptive control surface of an airfoil, has provided a significant number of research in compliant mechanisms for aircraft [24,25], wind energy [26][27][28], and other UAVs, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles [29][30][31].…”