Kriging Aerodynamic Modeling and Multi-Objective Control Allocation for Flying Wing UAVs With Morphing Trailing-Edge

Abstract

Flexible skin and continuous deformable control surface are the basic of adaptive wing technology for future aircraft. This paper presents a continuous morphing trailing-edge and its control allocation method for the flying wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV). Firstly, we apply the Kriging method to establish the aerodynamic model of the morphing trailing-edge, with the initial sample points generated by the non-uniform optimal Latin Hypercube Sampling (LHS). Then, based on the Kriging model, the multi-objective control allocation problem is converted into a standard optimization form. To solve such problem, we design a Comprehensive Multi-Objective Particle Swarm Optimization (C-MOPSO) algorithm and an improved Hierarchical MOPSO (H-MOPSO) algorithm, in which multiple optimization objectives are prioritized and hierarchically optimized using the PSO algorithm. As for performance analysis, an attitude angle tracking flight control system is established to validate the effectiveness of our proposed control allocation methods. Simulation results show that both the C-MOPSO and H-MOPSO methods have similar performance in attitude angle tracking, while H-MOPSO achieves better multi-objective allocation performance.

Keywords

• Flying wing UAV
• morphing trailing-edge
• Kriging aerodynamic modeling
• multi-objective control allocation
• particle swarm optimization