Flapping Wing Micro-Air-Vehicle Control Employing Triangular Wave Strokes and Cycle-Averaging

摘要

The recent development of the world’s rst robotic insect capable of vertical takeo at the Harvard Microrobotics Lab has sparked research e orts into devising similar vehicles capable of untethered ight. The vehicle design has been extended in simulation to use one actuator per wing to produce sinusoidal apping motion in a plane. This work proposes employing a generic triangular wave to generate the apping wing stroke angle. The resulting expressions for the wing beat cycle-averaged aerodynamic forces and moment are signi cantly simpler than those computed using sinusoidal waveforms, thus easing algebraic manipulation and analytical analysis. Wing beat parameters are employed as control inputs, a ecting the cycle-averaged aerodynamic forces and moments. The resulting control authority is assessed analytically. A ve degree-of-freedom control design is devised and used to control a six degree-of-freedom simulation of the vehicle. The simulation model is driven by the instantaneous aerodynamic forces and moments; and the cycle-averaged expressions are only used for control design. Three sets of wing beat parameters are used as control inputs to illustrate the freedom in control design and implementation. One mimics the sinusoidal waveform studies cases. The others illustrate how amplitude modulation can replace frequency modulation to achieve comparable performance results.