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

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 autonomous aerial robot called as Zanka-II manufactured at Erciyes University Faculty of Aeronautics and Astronautics Model Aircraft Laboratory is first observed in subsonic Wind Tunnel. Results obtained in such wind tunnel are subsequently validated using computational fluid dynamic (CFD) software (i.e. Ansys). Therefore, nose and tail cone of fuselage are improved in order to improve maximum fineness of the autonomous aerial robot. Finally, a novel scaled model using optimum data is redesigned and placed in Wind Tunnel 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.

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