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

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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 our autonomous aerial robot called as Zanka-II produced in Erciyes University Faculty of Aeronautics and Astronautics Model Aircraft Laboratory is first observed in sub-sonic Wind Tunnel. Results obtained in this wind tunnel are validated using a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software (i.e. Ansys). Therefore, nose and tail cone of fuselage are improved in order to maximize maximum fineness of the autonomous aerial robot. A novel scaled model using optimum data is then produced and placed in Wind Tunnel in order 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.