Inspired by the advantages from natural birds’ shape-morphing adapted flight performance, this work investigates how the bioinspired adaptative morph induced inertia variation affects the flight performance of a morphing quad-rotor. Extensive numerical and experimental evaluations on a custom-built morphing quad-rotor that is steered along a predefined path and hovers in the presence of constant wind disturbance were performed and analyzed. Simulation results demonstrate that the smaller quad-rotor exhibits better agility performance due to the compact volume/size and lower weight, while the bigger one appears more flight robustness in a disturbed environment such as windy testing area. Experimental studies further prove that by adaptatively altering its volume/size, our quad-rotor with the bioinspired in-flight morphing behavior can well execute path following tasks in a constrained space without deviating the trajectory when encountering obstacles, as well it can withstand external wind torque through morphing up its volume to therewith increase relevant moment-of-inertia for improving the flight robustness. Compared to the regular scaled aerial vehicles whose volumes’ change follows a weight change proportionally, our results also indicate that our in-flight morphing aerial vehicle mechanism (i.e. the quad-rotor morphs the volume but without changing weight/mass) shows more advantages in power efficiency and morphologically adaptative flight capability.

中文翻译：

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变形四旋翼飞行器仿生形态适应飞行性能比较验证研究


受自然鸟类变形适应飞行性能优势的启发，这项工作研究了仿生自适应变形引起的惯性变化如何影响变形四旋翼飞行性能。对定制的变形四旋翼飞行器进行了广泛的数值和实验评估，该四旋翼飞行器沿着预定路径行驶，并在持续风扰动的情况下悬停。仿真结果表明，较小的四旋翼由于体积紧凑、重量较轻而表现出更好的敏捷性，而较大的四旋翼在大风测试区等干扰环境中表现出更强的飞行鲁棒性。实验研究进一步证明，通过自适应地改变其体积/尺寸，具有仿生飞行变形行为的四旋翼飞行器可以在有限的空间内很好地执行路径跟踪任务，在遇到障碍物时不会偏离轨迹，并且可以承受外风通过增大其体积来增加扭矩，从而增加相关的惯性矩，从而提高飞行的鲁棒性。与体积随重量按比例变化而变化的常规比例飞行器相比，我们的结果还表明，我们的飞行变形飞行器机构（即四旋翼改变体积但不改变重量/质量）在以下​​方面表现出更多优势：功率效率和形态自适应飞行能力。