Wing Articulation of Micro Air Vehicles to Reduce Gust Sensitivity

Abstract : Micro air vehicles are relatively small in size and weight, yielding aircraft that are sensitive to atmospheric wind gusts. In order to reduce gust sensitivity of micro air vehicles, articulation of the main wings attachment to the fuselage to allow flapping is considered. A general and extensible flight dynamic model for articulated micro air vehicles is created where each rigid body of the system is treated as a separate rigid body with 6 degrees of freedom. The system is coupled together by appropriate constraint forces and moments which are determined with a nonlinear constraint controller with guaranteed stability properties so that connection constraints are always obeyed. An attractive feature of the technique is that conventional rigid 6 degree of freedom flight dynamic models can relatively easily be modified to create a multibody flight dynamic simulation tool. This tool is used to investigate gust response for a micro air vehicle. Gusts acting on articulated micro air vehicles result in complex dynamic response which is explored.