Building in reverse: a design method for highly deformable fluid-loaded structures

Advances in energy storage, navigation, and computational power enable smaller and highly capable unmanned systems. As system size decreases, highly deformable subsystems, whose morphology changes with the operating point of the system become useful. Tolerance and clever use of flexibility can allow us to build lighter wings, passively morphing rotorcraft, and better control surfaces. Designing highly flexible craft tends to rely on the repeated solution of the forward problem, coupled to some optimization. As the dimension of the search space increases, this technique becomes more costly, and the solution is constrained by the parameterization chosen by the designer. In this talk, we show a design method based on analyzing a closed inverse problem, which produces interesting solutions to this design problem on a number of sample subsystems: flexible multirotor drones, fish-like propulsors, and deformable fins.