Morphing aircraft reconfigure themselves to optimize flight performance for various and substantially different mission objectives. Research and simulation studies have shown the wide variety of performance benefits afforded by morphing technologies, but there have historically been barriers preventing the fabrication and testing of such vehicles. One of these barriers is a distributed actuation system having sufficiently high specific force or specific work capability. This paper reviews some

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... f our development work on a pneumatic actuation technology aimed at overcoming many of the limitations experienced with more conventional actuation concepts for the broad-scale dimensional changes of morphing aircraft. In particular, the present actuation system focuses on employing pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs). Various applications of pneumatic artificial muscles (PAMs) are presented for two actuations schemes: (1) a morphing cell for a wing section, (2) trailing edge flaps for wings or rotorcraft blades. Results of the prototype testing show that PAMs are capable of generating significant morphing or control authority at low frequency, as well as frequencies ranging up to 40 Hz, and can provide actuation for more than 120 million loading cycles without fatigue failure. These results establish the feasibility of PAMs for aerospace applications.