Morphing of inflatable wings

The paper presents work on developing unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with morphing inflatable wings. Inflatable wing stiffness varies with internal pressure, which is required for operation. The possibility exists to manipulate the wings through mechanical mechanisms to alter their performance and control the UAV. The overall research focuses on characterizing the deformation of the wings and developing a model to accurately predict this deformation. This paper discusses predicting and correlating the forces required to deform the wings to a particular shape, the deformation generated and the aerodynamic forces generated by that shape change. Roll control of the UAV will rely on the shape change of the wing. Hence, the paper examines work done on developing a model of the inflatable wings.