Published: Apr 2, 2026 by Daning Huang
On Apr. 2nd, our group members, Subarna Pudasaini and Parker Smith, delivered a seminar in the department. The seminar presents their achievements in the past two years, and some of the current main research thrusts.
Abstract: Morphing aerial vehicles offer potentially enhanced maneuverability and efficiency over their fixed-wing counterparts; however, the trade off between performance gains and actuation costs in dynamic maneuvers remains under-explored. What further complicates the exploration is the inherent multi-disciplinary nature of morphing aerial vehicles: The unsteady aerodynamics, structural dynamics, and control are tightly coupled, resulting in highly nonlinear aeroservoelastic dynamics. We took a progressive approach to the analysis of morphing aerial vehicles that gradually increases the model fidelity. We first performed a preliminary study using a low-fidelity linear parameter-varying model, which established the reachability benefits of morphing and the necessity of trajectory optimization over kinematic planning to ensure dynamic feasibility. Subsequently, a mid-fidelity aeroservoelastic model was integrated into a trajectory optimization framework to evaluate trajectory-level impacts across complex maneuvers. Results demonstrate that utilizing trajectory optimization to exploit aero-mechanical coupling allows morphing vehicles to achieve significantly enhanced maneuverability with superior energy efficiency. Moving forward, this research aims to develop physics-informed reduced-order models (PIROMs) and controllability metrics analogous to those in linear systems to quantify maneuverability without the computational overhead of large scale trajectory optimization. These advancements will provide the necessary tools to eventually facilitate the full control co-design of autonomous morphing aerial vehicles.