Constrained cooperative control design for distributed morphing wing systems

An efficient design method is proposed for the cooperative control problem of morphing wing systems with distributed structures and bounded control inputs. The multi-agent model of the distributed morphing wing system is established. The cooperative controllers with saturation constraints are presented. By introducing the concepts in consensus algorithms, the cooperative information links in the controllers are described by graphs, and the corresponding Laplacian matrix is defined. The design conditions of the cooperative controllers are proposed, in the form of linear matrix inequalities. For the case of undirected information links, the controller design conditions are simplified as algebraic inequalities, which highly reduce the computation cost. The designed controllers are implemented on a distributed morphing wing platform, and experiments are carried out. Simulation and experiment results show that the controllers can make all the actuating units in the morphing wing system cooperatively achieve the desired positions, which demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed theory.