Jeger Simon Luis, Wüest Valentin, Toumieh Charbel, Floreano Dario
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland.
Npj Robot. 2024;2(1):8. doi: 10.1038/s44182-024-00015-y. Epub 2024 Nov 20.
Avian-inspired drones feature morphing wing and tail surfaces, enhancing agility and adaptability in flight. Despite their large potential, realising their full capabilities remains challenging due to the lack of generalized control strategies accommodating their large degrees of freedom and cross-coupling effects between their control surfaces. Here we propose a new body-rate controller for avian-inspired drones that uses all available actuators to control the motion of the drone. The method exhibits robustness against physical perturbations, turbulent airflow, and even loss of certain actuators mid-flight. Furthermore, wing and tail morphing is leveraged to enhance energy efficiency at 8 m/s, 10 m/s, and 12 m/s using in-flight Bayesian optimization. The resulting morphing configurations yield significant gains across all three speeds of up to 11.5% compared to non-morphing configurations and display a strong resemblance to avian flight at different speeds. This research lays the groundwork for the development of autonomous avian-inspired drones that operate under diverse wind conditions, emphasizing the role of morphing in improving energy efficiency.
受鸟类启发的无人机具有可变形的机翼和尾翼表面，可增强飞行中的敏捷性和适应性。尽管它们具有巨大潜力，但由于缺乏适应其大自由度和控制面之间交叉耦合效应的通用控制策略，要实现其全部功能仍具有挑战性。在此，我们为受鸟类启发的无人机提出一种新的机体速率控制器，该控制器利用所有可用的执行器来控制无人机的运动。该方法对物理扰动、紊流气流甚至飞行中某些执行器的故障具有鲁棒性。此外，利用飞行中的贝叶斯优化，在8米/秒、10米/秒和12米/秒的速度下，通过机翼和尾翼变形来提高能量效率。与未变形配置相比，所得的变形配置在所有三种速度下均产生了高达11.5%的显著增益，并且在不同速度下与鸟类飞行有很强的相似性。这项研究为在不同风况下运行的自主受鸟类启发的无人机的开发奠定了基础，强调了变形在提高能量效率方面的作用。
