Stabilization Of Flapping-wing Micro-air Vehicles In Gust Environmentspaper Single Space

Transcript

This study presents an approach to develop a controller for stabilization of a flapping wing micro-air vehicle (MAV) operating in gusty environments. The rigid-wing MAV is modeled as a nonlinear periodic system and the periodic-shooting method is used to find a trimmed periodic orbit. A linearized discrete-time representation of the system is created about this trimmed periodic orbit. This linearized representation is used for control synthesis based on linear quadratic regulator (LQR) theory. The kinematic variables defining the wing motion are used as control inputs. The controller is implemented on the nonlinear system model to stabilize the system in the presence of external disturbances, modeled as discrete gusts in this study. The performance of the controller, in terms of the gust speed tolerance of the nonlinear, closed-loop system, is compared for different sets of controller parameters. The LQR based controller is capable of stabilizing the system under both longitudinal and lateral gust disturbances, however the maximum gust speed that can be tolerated by a given controller is influenced by a variety of parameters, as discussed in the paper. Numerical simulations show that tolerance of longitudinal gusts is far higher than lateral gust tolerance. The study also shows that lateral control of the MAV can be achieved using only the wing-stroke magnitude and wing-stroke offset as the control inputs for each wing.