What is it about?
Birds react to gusts of wind by changing the shape of their wings. We used artificial intelligence to enable a morphing wing to autonomously learn gust rejection by performing uniform and parabolic shape changes. Interestingly the non-uniform shape changes showed significantly greater aerodynamic efficiency than the uniform method for some gust conditions.
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Why is it important?
Incorporating methods such as these will help enable small uncrewed aerial vehicles to perform missions in complex environments, such as cities, where gusts challenge current designs.
Perspectives
In addition to the direct application of gust rejection, I hope this article provides readers with a new perspective on how reinforcement learning can be used for more than controller development, but also as a tool to explore interesting questions around robotic design.
Kevin Haughn
United States Army Research Laboratory
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Spanwise Camber Morphing Offers Potential Efficiency Gains During Autonomous Gust Rejection, January 2024, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA),
DOI: 10.2514/6.2024-1124.
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