Aeroservoelastic Modeling for Trajectory Optimization of Morphing Aircrafts

Abstract Morphing aerial vehicles exhibit enhanced maneuverability when compared to their fixed configuration counterparts; this improves their mission performance, e.g., in obstacle avoidance. However, the trade-off in enhanced performance is the complexity of the controller design due to the increased degrees of freedom. This paper presents a mid-fidelity aeroservoelastic model for a morphing wing aircraft together with a trajectory optimization framework. As a benchmark problem, the flexible morphing wing aircraft is compared against the flexible non-morphing aircraft for a pure pull-up scenario, considering aeroservoelastic effects across three cases: non-morphing, uniform morphing, and independent morphing. The results show that symmetric morphing inputs improve terminal height in a pure pull-up maneuver by 9.9% over a non-morphing configuration, demonstrating significant benefits in maneuverability; meanwhile allowing independent morphing moments provides no additional performance gain. A gradient-free optimal trajectory planner based on Model Predictive Path Integral (MPPI) was also employed to show that the MPPI algorithm is a promising solution for trajectory optimization in an aeroservoelastic setting. The results validate the framework’s effectiveness for trajectory optimization with aeroservoelastic dynamics. Future work will focus on incorporating more accurate morphing control inputs and control costs into the optimization process and scaling up the framework for higher-dimensional control inputs in more complex flight missions.