  Achieving precise, highly-dynamic maneuvers with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles
(UAVs) is a major challenge due to the complexity of the associated
aerodynamics. In particular, unsteady effects -- as might be experienced in
post-stall regimes or during sudden vehicle morphing -- can have an adverse
impact on the performance of modern flight control systems. In this paper, we
present a vortex particle model and associated model-based controller capable
of reasoning about the unsteady aerodynamics during aggressive maneuvers. We
evaluate our approach in hardware on a morphing-wing UAV executing post-stall
perching maneuvers. Our results show that the use of the unsteady aerodynamics
model improves performance during both fixed-wing and dynamic-wing perching,
while the use of wing-morphing planned with quasi-steady aerodynamics results
in reduced performance. While the focus of this paper is a pre-computed control
policy, we believe that, with sufficient computational resources, our approach
could enable online planning in the future.
