Control Design for Nonlinear Flexible Wings of a Robotic Aircraft

Abstract

In this brief, the control problem for flexible wings of a robotic aircraft is addressed by using boundary control schemes. Inspired by birds and bats, the wing with flexibility and articulation is modeled as a distributed parameter system described by hybrid partial differential equations and ordinary differential equations. Boundary control for both wing twist and bending is proposed on the original coupled dynamics, and bounded stability is proved by introducing a proper Lyapunov function. The effectiveness of the proposed control is verified by simulations.