1. School of Mechanical Engineering, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710072, China;
2. Unmanned System Research Institute, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an 710072, China
Smart morphing structures represent a key technology for future advanced equipment such as unmanned aerial vehicles, where distributed active deformation structures enable smooth, continuous, and multi-degree-of-freedom shape changes, serving as an effective mean to significantly enhance structural performance and mission adaptability. Addressing this need, this study proposes an innovative design and control scheme for shape memory alloy (SMA)-driven smart lattice structures. Firstly, the proposed pseudo-thermal deformation method (PTDM) provides an efficient approach to evaluate deformation performance of SMA actuators. Simulation and experimental verification demonstrate that this method achieves deformation analysis accuracy within 5% error for smart lattice structures. It successfully realizes multi-degreeof-freedom controllable shape morphing. Furthermore, an optimized distributed actuation design model was developed with energy consumption minimization as the objective function and deformation precision as constraint condition. In a wing structure application, this model achieved high-precision 400 mm deformation at 8 control points with less than 1% error while consuming only 16.67% of the global energy. To address real-time control challenges in large-scale structures, a BP neural network was employed to achieve precise prediction and control of multiple degrees of freedom deformation. The proposed method exhibits remarkable versatility, being extendable to various SMA actuation configurations and smart structural designs like composite wings, providing a new solution for next-generation smart morphing structural systems that integrate both mechanical performance and smart deformation capabilities.