In in flight wing folding can have advantages and NASA wants to make it happen. The idea here isn't to create controlled drives, of course, but to increase the efficiency and capabilities of aircraft. The space agency calls this the Spanwise Adaptive Wing (SAW). So far, articulating wings on airplanes have largely been for parking purposes, to allow palnes to take up less space on an aircraft carrier's decks or fit into smaller hangars. A few very large aircraft have articulating wings to allow them to taxi between infrastructure at an airport. What NASA is working on is very different from all of this.
They've been working on a lot of similar things for years. The Environmentally Responsible Aviation project, for example,has been working on Bendable wings.
We are revisiting folding-wing aircraft," because new technologies that did not exist in the 1960s allow actuation to be put in tighter wings, in smaller volumes." This allows a much thinner wing and a thinner portion of the wing to become articulable. Namely the tips of wings, which are normally rigidly fixed.
Moreover, NASA says, the adjustable wing ends would be able to change position dynamically, creating mixtures of lift and yaw control as needed during different flight conditions.
NASA plans to test these ideas on the scale model PTERA (Prototype-Technology Evaluation and Research Aircraft) in the spring of 2017. That will coincide with ground-based tests of full-sized actuators capable of scale wing articulation. The objectives of this testing will be the validation of tools and the vetting of the system's theoretical vehicle control law evaluation. Analysis of airworthiness and potential fuel savings will also be undertaken.
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