Designing small flying vehicles for reconnaissance and surveillance is a particularly challenging endeavor. Because of air viscosity and turbulence effects, fixed wings and aerodynamic shapes that work well at the scale of airplanes and eagle-sized drone vehicles are not effective at the scale of a hummingbird. Mathematically modeling the flexible moving wings required by micro-aerial vehicles (MAVs) can consume significant computational resources.

This project is devoted to finding accurate, efficient methods for solving partial differential equation (PDE)-constrained optimization problems of the type encountered in MAV wing design research. Goals include more efficient PDE-solving software, a large-scale optimization solver for use with complex problems, a standalone quadratic programming (QP) package for solving large-scale optimization problems with many degrees of freedom, and better software for solving sparse least-squares problems.

(This project is an outgrowth of Project 4-4, which ran from 2007 to 2009.)