With the goal of designing a biologically inspired robot that can hold a stable hover under internal and external disturbances. We designed a tailless Flapping-wing Micro Aerial Vehicle (FMAV) with onboard 3D velocity perception. In this way, the wind disturbance caused by the relative motion of the FMAV can be quantified in real time based on the established altitudinal dynamics model. For the rest of the total disturbance, an active disturbance rejection controller is proposed to estimate and suppress those disturbances. In comparison with the traditional PID controller, this proposed approach has been validated. The results show that, in the hovering flight with the internal unmodeled dynamics, the root-mean-square of height controlled is only 2.53 cm. Even with the different weights of loads mounting on the FMAV, the ascending trajectory of flights remains impressively consistent. In the forward flight with the external disturbance, the root-mean-square error of height controlled is 2.78 cm. When the FMAV flies over a ladder introducing an abrupt external disturbance, the maximum overshoot is only half of that controlled by the PID controller. To our best knowledge, this is the first demonstration of FMAVs with the capability of sensing motion-generated wind disturbance onboard and handling the internal and external disturbances in hover flight.
Purpose
Vertical take-off is commonly adopted in most insect-mimicking flapping-wing micro air vehicles (FMAV) while insects also adopt horizontal take-off from the ground. The purpose of this paper is to study how insects adjust their attitude in such a short time during horizontal take-off by means of designing and testing an FMAV based on stroke plane modulation.
Design/methodology/approach
An FMAV prototype based on stroke plane rotating modulation is built to test the flight performance during horizontal take-off. Dynamic gain and decoupling mixer is added to compensate for the nonlinearity during the rotation angle of the stroke plane getting too large at the beginning of take-off. Force/torque test based on a six-axis sensor validates the change of aerodynamic force and torque at different rotation angles. High-speed camera and motion capture system test the flight performance of horizontal take-off.
Findings
Stroke plane modulation can provide a great initial pitch toque for FMAV to realize horizontal take-off. But the large range of rotation angles causes nonlinearity and coupling of roll and yaw. A dynamic gain and a mixer are added in the controller, and the FMAV successfully achieves horizontally taking off in less than 1 s.
Originality/value
The research in this paper shows stroke plane modulation is suitable for insect’s horizontal take-off
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