Data-driven morphable wing for tracking and mapping using small UAVs

The arrival of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles into the civil scene, has been a breakthrough in the capabilities of testing new morphing-wing designs. Compared to full-scale, manned aircraft, their low-cost, fast implementation, advances on precision, automation, and the versatility of these unmanned platforms, have greatly over-passed those of conventional aircraft, turning them into the preferred choice to carry out hazardous missions where the operation of a manned aircraft does not justify the cost. In the atmospheric research field, UAVs have become a powerful tool for the study of meteorological phenomena. This missions usually require a mixed tracking and mapping approach that can be fulfilled with an aircraft equipped with a morphing wing. In this document, we focus on enhancing the aircraft geometry through morphing wing techniques, to upgrade the efficiency of a UAV through these kind of missions and, therefore, get the most out of the energy in its storage devices. We describe our approach, which consists on modeling the aircraft aerodynamic forces through 2-D Panels and Vortex Lattice methods. We then proceed with the design of an extended span-changing wing. We test the original and extended configurations, and compare them to verify which one gives us better performance under nominal mission conditions. Finally, we compare the results of our simulation with the data obtained after flying a physical prototype on several test missions. After quantitatively and qualitatively analyzing the data obtained in these tests, and performing further maneuverability analysis, our prototype shows measurable energy consumption differences, between the extended and original wing, above 20%, on average, when maintaining a low-speed flight regime. This leads to a criteria table that a data-driven morphing wing could follow to achieve optimum use of the available energy