Avian-Inspired Devices for Improved Mission Adaptability in Unmanned Aerial Vehcles

There are significant efforts underway focusing on understanding the physics of avian flight. There is also increasing need for small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to conduct a variety of civilian and military mission scenarios. This paper starts by showing that avian-inspired flight has the potential to combine desired flight capabilities of hovering, maneuverability, agility, safety, and stealth in UAVs. The concept of wings as multifunctional adaptive structures is discussed and several flight devices found in birds’ wings are introduced as a pathway towards revolutionizing the current design of small UAVs. These devices include adaptive wing tips for increased agility, covert-inspired deployable structures and alula-inspired leading edge devices for stall mitigation and separation control. Experimental, analytical, and numerical results are presented to show the feasibility of adapting these devices to engineered vehicles. The experimental studies conducted on the engineered systems also provide insights into the physics of the living systems and can be used to increase the current understanding of the morphology and function of these devices in nature.