Avian-informed drones feature morphing wing and tail surfaces, enhancing agility and adaptability in flight. Despite their large potential, realising their full capabilities remains challenging due to the lack of generalized control strategies accommodating their large degrees of freedom and cross-coupling effects between their control surfaces. Here we propose a new body-rate controller for avian-informed drones that uses all available actuators to control the motion of the drone. The method exhibits robustness against physical perturbations, turbulent airflow, and even loss of certain actuators mid-flight. Furthermore, wing and tail morphing is leveraged to enhance energy efficiency at 8m/s, 10m/s and 12m/s using in-flight Bayesian optimization. The resulting morphing configurations yield significant gains across all three speeds of up to 11.5% compared to non-morphing configurations and display a strong resemblance to avian flight at different speeds. This research lays the groundwork for the development of autonomous avian-informed drones that operate under diverse wind conditions, emphasizing the role of morphing in improving energy efficiency.

翻译：仿生鸟类无人机采用可变形的机翼和尾翼面以增强飞行灵活性与适应性。尽管潜力巨大，但由于缺乏能兼容其高自由度及舵面间交叉耦合效应的通用控制策略，实现其全部功能仍面临挑战。本文提出一种新型体轴角速率控制器，通过整合所有可用执行机构控制无人机运动。该方法对物理扰动、湍流气流乃至飞行中特定舵面失效均表现出鲁棒性。进一步地，利用机翼与尾翼的变体能力，通过飞行中贝叶斯优化在8米/秒、10米/秒及12米/秒空速下提升能效。相较于非变体构型，所得变体配置在三个速度段均实现显著效能增益（最高达11.5%），且与不同速度下鸟类飞行形态高度相似。本研究为开发能在多样化风况下自主运行、并强调变体技术对能效提升作用的仿鸟无人机奠定了基础。