A novel actuator controller: delivering a practical solution to realization of active-truss-based morphing wings

Abstract

A novel actuator controller is proposed in this paper for active-truss-based morphing wings (ATBMWs). An ATBMW is a new type of smart structure capable of smooth and continuous profile change, and has the potential to provide better stealth and aerodynamic performance over airfoils with discrete control surfaces. However, the sophisticated ATBMW framework and large amount of highly interacted actuators make it difficult to obtain the overall rigid-body dynamics of the wing for controller design and inconvenient to tune controllers on board. The focus of this study is, thus, to solve the aforementioned problems by developing an actuator-level control scheme that does not rely on the wing rigid-body dynamics and on-board tuning. The linear-quadratic-Gaussian (LQG) controller is adopted for actuator trajectory tracking, and a novel unknown-input estimator (UIE) is devised to handle unmodeled dynamics. By integrating the UIE with the LQG algorithm, a new tracking controller with enhanced tolerance to uncertainties is constructed. It is shown in simulations and experiments on an ATBMW prototype that the proposed UIE-integrated LQG controller can be designed simply using the known actuator dynamics without on-board tuning, and superior trajectory tracking of actuators was observed despite the presence of unmodeled dynamics and exogenous disturbances.