Wind Tunnel Studies on Autonomous Hybrid VTOL UAV with Wing Morphing Technology

CSIR-NAL has designed VTOL winged UAV to address hybrid unmanned vehicle requirements. The hybrid UAV's aerodynamics and propulsion characteristics have been validated through wind tunnel test and to achieve better flight performance, a morphing wing technology was developed using multi-axis robotic concept. The multi axis controller was realized for the morphed wing mechanism of VTOL UAV through LMA and PID controller. The control motion simulation was performed in MATLAB. The experimental results were obtained on a typical UAV morphing wing travel in multi-axis with a dedicated test rig. The controller successfully detected the IMU sensors and adopted with APM (Autopilot mode) instrumentation, simulating the flight condition. The controller with the Robotic Coupling System for WTT was operationalized at NAL's MART Tunnel facility. This approach generates a simple model with a relatively high degree of accuracy, which can be easily integrated on to the wind tunnel tested hybrid UAV to develop high performance all terrain capable VTOL vehicles.