Autonomous flight performance improvement of the morphing aerial robot by aerodynamic shape redesign

Year 2019, Volume: 23 Issue: 1, 51 - 65, 01.02.2019

Harun Çelik , Tuğrul Oktay , Metin Uzun

https://doi.org/10.16984/saufenbilder.362588

Abstract

In this article, autonomous flight performance of an
unmanned aerial robot is advanced by benefiting aerodynamic nose and tail cone
shapes redesign both experimentally and computationally. For this intention,
aerodynamic performance criteria (i.e. maximum fineness) of a scaled model of
our autonomous aerial robot called as Zanka-II produced in Erciyes University
Faculty of Aeronautics and Astronautics Model Aircraft Laboratory is first
observed in sub-sonic Wind Tunnel. Results obtained in this wind tunnel are
validated using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software (i.e. Ansys).
Therefore, nose and tail cone of fuselage are improved in order to maximize
maximum fineness of the autonomous aerial robot. A novel scaled model using
optimum data is then produced and placed in Wind Tunnel in order to validate
Ansys results with experimental results. By using geometrical data of ultimate
aerodynamically optimized aerial robot, better autonomous flight performance is
achieved in both simulation environment (i.e. Matlab and Simulink) and real
time flights.

Keywords

Aerodynamic shape, Aerial robots, Autonomous performance, Nose cone, Tail cone

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