Advances in Robotics & Automation

Modeling and Control of a Dragonfly-like Micro Aerial Vehicle

Abstract

Du CP, Xu JX and Zheng Y

The modeling and control design of a dragonfly-like flapping wing micro aerial vehicle (FWMAV) are studied in this paper. The aerodynamic force model of flapping wings is presented first, which is obtained by the local air velocity of the wing and local attack angle of the wing, unlike some existing works. Then, the complete mathematic model of FWMAV is developed by combining the aerodynamic force model and a kinematic model in which the micro aerial vehicle is regarded as a 6 degree-of-freedom rigid body. To mimic real dragonflies, the tail of the FWMAV swings only, unlike fixed-wing aircrafts that possess conventional control surfaces in tail. This yields a control difficulty due to the loss of the maneuverability in tail. To design an appropriate control mechanism, the complete FWMAV model, which is highly nonlinear, is rewritten in a companion form. The controller is designed to iteratively solve for a desired control signal profile by means of a dual-loop nonlinear dynamic inversion with Newton-Raphson solution. Numerical simulation results show that the effectiveness and convergence performance of the nonlinear controller are obtained.