Flight control of flapping-wing robot with three paired direct-driven piezoelectric actuators

Abstract

To realize safe mobile sensing in spaces around people, a flapping-wing robot with a weight of 1.15 g, wingspan of 115 mm, and three paired actuators is designed and fabricated in this study. The paired-wing actuators enable the suppression of wing–body and wing–wing coupling vibrations, as well as enhance the lift force. A model-based design of a stable flight controller was considered, where the lift force was assumed to work at an acting point on spatio-temporal average. Furthermore, an adaptive control law was employed for parameters that could not be measured. The effectiveness of the proposed controller was demonstrated through flight experiments.