Morphing Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Dynamic Soaring Applications

Download or read book Morphing Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles and Dynamic Soaring Applications written by Holly L. Griffiths and published by . This book was released on 2018 with total page 51 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ocean birds such as Albatross and Petrels use Dynamic Soaring to travel extremely long distances using minimal energy. Using vision and the mechanoreceptors within their skin and feathers, they can sense local wind conditions. By sensing these changes in the local spatio-temporal wind map, they can take advantage by flying trajectories that extract energy from the surrounding wind gradients. Inspired by the flight of these birds, the preliminary work for a small UAV (SUAV) system is proposed, with a morphing wing structure that can additionally estimate local wind conditions with only standard flight computer sensors (IMU, Magnetometer, GPS, Static and Dynamic Pressure) using parameter estimation via Kalman Filter. Groundwork for trajectory optimization with the addition of Morphing geometry is laid out, and the framework for a proposed unified trajectory planning and tracking Model Predictive Controller (MPC) is also investigated.