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Aerolang: A Dimensionally-Aware Domain-Specific Language for Real-Time Flight Control with Integrated Morphing Wing Physics Cover

Aerolang: A Dimensionally-Aware Domain-Specific Language for Real-Time Flight Control with Integrated Morphing Wing Physics

Open Access
|Jun 2026

Abstract

Safety-critical flight software for autonomous aerial vehicles must respect the physics of flight and the constraints of embedded hardware. Existing practice relies on general-purpose languages where physical units are implicit and dimensional consistency is enforced only by reviews, unit tests, and flight campaigns—leaving systems vulnerable to catastrophic unit mismatches such as the Mars Climate Orbiter loss. This paper introduces AeroLang, a domain-specific language for flight control that makes physical units and real-time constraints first-class language citizens. AeroLang programs combine explicit SI unit annotations, declarative real-time loop periods, and an @EMBEDDED mode that statically forbids unbounded allocation. A complete compiler pipeline is presented: an LALR(1) parser, a semantic type checker performing compile-time dimensional analysis, and a Python code generator producing zero-overhead control components. The language is demonstrated through a morphing-wing UAV controller coupled to a free-vortex-wake aerodynamic model and an Euler-Bernoulli aeroelastic model. All dimensional inconsistencies are caught at compile time, the generated controller executes with negligible overhead, and the closed-loop system reproduces morphing-wing efficiency gains of approximately 11.3% in lift-to-drag ratio, consistent with published literature.

Language: English
Page range: 119 - 138
Submitted on: Mar 28, 2026
Accepted on: May 12, 2026
Published on: Jun 17, 2026
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services

© 2026 Aaryan Chaulagain, published by ŁUKASIEWICZ RESEARCH NETWORK – INSTITUTE OF AVIATION
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.