Simultaneous Flight Control System and Twist-Morphing Wing Design of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Over the last years, application of morphing technologies in aircraft design field have become widespread together with developments in material technologies. In this context, this study discusses the design of an innovative twist-morphing wing on a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) aiming for obtaining improvement in stall behavior (i.e. stall propagation) and autonomous flight performance. The twist-morphing wing design was designed to be capable of twisting in terms of wash-out angle between 0-degree to 6-degree. In order to have such a multidisciplinary improvement, simultaneous design approach was integrated and SPSA optimization algorithm was used. The washout angle and longitudinal and lateral PID controller coefficients were optimized to have enhancement in autonomous flight performance defined in rise time, settling time and maximum overshoot, which are related with step responses. In result, longitudinal, lateral and total performances were improved by 33.92%, 33.81% and 65.14%, respectively.