Drones Changing Shape

An example of how defensive activities of Drones are also at play.

Research Leads to Army Drones Changing Shape Mid-Flight
U.S. Army
June 16, 2020

Researchers at the U.S. Army's Combat Capabilities Development Command's Army Research Laboratory and Texas A&M University helped create a tool that will enable autonomous aerial drones to change shape during flight. The tool can optimize the structural configuration of Future Vertical Lift vehicles while accounting for wing deformation due to fluid-structure interaction. Fluid-structure interaction analyses generally have high computational costs because they typically require coupling between a fluid and a structural solver. The researchers were able to reduce the computational cost for a single run by as much as 80% by developing a process that decouples the fluid and structural solvers, which offers further computational cost savings by allowing for additional structural configurations to be performed without reanalyzing the fluid.  ... "