Modeling and control for an in-plane morphing wing

Abstract

System modeling and controller design for an in-plane morphing wing, which is proposed by NextGen Aeronautics, Inc., are investigated in the present paper. The model of the morphing wing is developed based on Lagrange method. The elastic forces of the skin and the aerodynamic load acting on the leading edge are both taken into account. The generalized forces are obtained by virtual work principle. Since the morphing wing is a strongly coupled, over-actuated and nonlinear system with multi-input and multi-output, the control system design includes a control allocator, a dynamic inversion controller and two PID controllers. The control allocator is designed base on pseudo inverse method; the dynamic inversion controller is applied to make the original system decoupled into two independent linear systems by proper nonlinear feedback transformation; two classical PID controllers are adopted for the linearlized systems. The correctness of the model is verified by ADAMS simulation and the effectiveness of the control system is tested by Matlab. The results indicate that, integrating Lagrange equation, pseudo inverse control allocation, dynamic inversion control and classical PID method, is an effective way to solve problems of modeling and control for morphing wings.