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Meeting	ACGS Committee Meeting 99 - Boulder - March 2007
Agenda Location	6 SUBCOMMITTEE A – AERONAUTIC AND SURFACE VEHICLES 6.1 Control of a Morphing Aircraft
Title	Control of a Morphing Aircraft
Presenter	John Valasek
Affiliation	Texas A&M
Available Downloads*	presentation paper
	Downloads are available to members who are logged in and either Active* or attended this meeting.
Abstract	According to NASA, “The seemingly effortless flight of birds provides the inspiration for new aircraft utilizing wings that reconfigure in flight.” True morphing will involve a seamless, aerodynamically efficient aircraft capable of radical shape change. By shifting its shape, the aircraft will also be able to change its mission, something today’s military platforms accomplish by loading new sensors, weapons, or other payloads. This presentation addresses the questions of when to morph, and how to morph. It does not address structural control, but rather morphing for mission adaptation, which is a large scale, relatively slow, in-flight shape change to enable a single vehicle to perform multiple diverse mission profiles. A concept is introduced in which a Traditional Control methodology (Model Reference Adaptive Control) and an Artificial Intelligence methodology (Reinforcement Learning) are married to produce a controller which actually learns how to morph. Optimality is addressed by objective functions representing optimal shapes corresponding to each flight condition. The methodology is demonstrated by an example of a 3-D morphing air vehicle, which is required to track a specified trajectory and autonomously morph over a set of shapes corresponding to the flight conditions along the way. Results presented show that this methodology is capable of learning the required shape and morphing into it, and accurately tracking the trajectory in the presence of parametric uncertainties, unmodeled dynamics, and disturbances.