Overview of Micro Air Vehicle System Design and Integration Issues

Abstract

The design of micro air vehicles (MAV) presents one of the most formidable challenges to not only aerospace, but electrical, mechanical, and computer engineers because of flight regime in which these tiny aircraft operate. Aerospace designers must contend with issues surrounding low Reynolds number flight while electrical and mechanical designers will be concerned with issues of energy storage, behavior of materials at small scales, and non‐scaling items. The missions at which MAVs will excel demand increased levels of autonomy, forcing computer engineers to create innate onboard intelligence exhibiting high bandwidth and superior abilities to interpret obstacle‐rich environments not usually encountered by larger flying machines. This chapter provides an overview of the issues associated with micro flight and how some researchers are taking cues from creation to produce insecta‐ and aves‐class robotic life forms for a wide range of useful missions.

Exploring tandem wing UAS designs for operation in turbulent urban environments

“…Heave has been identified as a common perturbation for SUASs and MAVs when in turbulence with length scales that are greater or equal to its wing span. 8,21 The tandem wing design would appear to counter heave perturbations without the need to change the aircrafts pitch angle as much as is the case with conventional configurations. This can be particularly useful for on-board payloads which can be blurred due to rotational motion.…”

Fixed-wing MAV attitude stability in atmospheric turbulence—Part 2: Investigating biologically-inspired sensors

“…Bio-mimicry (i.e. exact copy) is usually ineffective where biological structures often serve multiple purposes (Michelson, 2010). In contrast, bio-inspiration presents a practical approach whereby only the fundamentals are exploited for an implementation that suits the application.…”

An Efficient Design of the Piezoresistive Pressure Sensor Applied for Micro Aerial Vehicle

“…These are just few examples of missions or application that MAV can conduct. On the other hand, the fabrication of such small size vehicles requires new research in designing optimization procedures, inventing lightweight materials, fabricating microelectronic devices, and so on [5][6]. Among the microelectronic devices required for MAV, barometric pressure sensor is an important one and thus the pressure sensor in this work is designed for a range of 0-1.2 bar.Microelectromechanical system (MEMS) is a system where mechanical, and electronics elements are integrated in a common substrate using integrated circuit process techniques [7][8][9].…”