| Morphing and flapping wings are enabling technologies for vehicles of the future. Vehicles with morphing and flapping wings will have greater mission capability and flexibility thereby enabling more autonomy, will be substantially more maneuverable, will be able to fly maintaining stability in the presence of larger gusts and will weigh less than current vehicles by eliminating repetitious control effectors. The dynamics of morphing and flapping wing vehicles are inherently aeroservoelastic since the interaction of aerodynamics, structural flexibility, and structural dynamics are critical to performance and will be altered by any control effectors. However, current aeroservoelastic modeling and control strategies are not sufficient to realize the full range of benefits offered by wings which change shape substantially. Most vehicles attempt to eliminate aeroservoelastic dependencies with aircraft design or decrease their effects with some form of control. Yet these aeroservoelastic dependences may be harnessed to provide substantial benefits for morphing and flapping wings.;This dissertation reviews historical examples of morphing and flapping wings and the aeroservoelastic phenomena present which may affect their performance. The work then measures and identifies nonlinear behaviors in the aeroservoelastic dynamics present for morphing and flapping with time-frequency analysis for a variety of wings. A model of the morphing and flapping wings as a function of each control effector is formulated. These models capture the nonlinear behavior and are a basis from which to compute the deflection in response to any available control command. This work then identifies a model of the aeroservoelastic dynamics for morphing and flapping flexible wings based on experimentally obtained data. Lastly, the work defines a feedforward and feedback control synthesis which may be used to control the aeroservoelastic models which have been identified. The models are used to track a desired wing shape for a realistic morphing and flapping wing, thereby leveraging aeroservoelastic effects to provide performance benefits for vehicles with morphing and flapping wings. |
