Investigation of coupled wing/tail morphing effects through bio-inspired flow sensing

Conventional non-rotary Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) suffer from a lack of manoeuvrability and poor gust tolerance, which limits their use in congested environments such as dense urban areas.

Birds circumvent these issues by morphing their wings and tail in response to local flow conditions detected by their feathers, which act as distributed flow sensors.

Bio-inspired morphing UAVs have recently been shown to provide large manoeuvrability gains over conventional equivalents; however, distributed flow sensing has not been demonstrated, restricting the benefits of morphing as a gust rejection method.

This research proposal aims to investigate the benefits of combining these two technologies, with a particular focus on the coupling of wing and tail morphing.

Initial work will study the wing and tail coupling of birds of prey, in collaboration with biologists at the University of Oxford.

These results will be used to inform wind tunnel experiments on a morphing UAV model, allowing characterisation of the aerodynamics of coupled wing-tail morphing manoeuvres.

The model will then be adapted for free-flight, using a flight controller designed with the wind tunnel aerodynamic results, to investigate real-world manoeuvrability and gust tolerance benefits.