Robust Co-design Optimisation for Agile Fixed-Wing UAVs

Published July 22, 2026 · Category: Robotics

Overview

arXiv:2603.11130v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Co-design optimisation of autonomous systems has emerged as a powerful alternative to sequential approaches by jointly optimising physical design and control strategies. However, existing frameworks often neglect the robustness required for autonomous systems navigating unstructured, real-world environments. For agile Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) operating at the edge of the flight envelope, this lack of robustness yields designs that are sensitive to perturbations and model mismatch. To address this, we propose a robust co-design framework for agile fixed-wing UAVs that integrates parametric uncertainty and wind disturbances directly into the concurrent optimisation process. Our bi-level approach optimises physical design in a high-level loop while discovering nominal solutions via a constrained trajectory planner and evaluating performance across a stochastic Monte Carlo ensemble using feedback LQR control. Validated across three agile flight missions, our strategy consistently outperforms deterministic baselines. The results demonstrate that our robust co-design strategy inherently tailors aerodynamic features, such as wing placement and aspect ratio, to achieve an optimal trade-off between mission performance and disturbance rejection.

Source

Originally published at arxiv.org.

Related Articles

• RoboInter1.5: A Holistic Intermediate Representation Suite for Embodied World Modeling and Robotic Manipulation
• SKETCH: Semantic Key-Point Conditioning for Long-Horizon Vessel Trajectory Prediction
• STeP: Signal Temporal Logic for Precise Specifications for Action Generation with Vision Language Models