Novel Dihedral-Based Control of Flapping-Wing Aircraft With Application to Perching
Abstract
We describe the design of an aerial robot inspired by birds and the underlying theoretical developments leading to novel control and closed-loop guidance algorithms for a perching maneuver. A unique feature of this robot is that it uses wing articulation to control the flight path angle as well as the heading angle. It lacks a vertical tail for improved agility, which results in unstable lateral-directional dynamics. New closed-loop motion planning algorithms with guaranteed stability are obtained by rewriting the flight dynamic equations in the spatial domain rather than as functions of time, after which dynamic inversion is employed. It is shown that nonlinear dynamic inversion naturally leads to proportional-integral-derivative controllers, thereby providing an exact method for tuning the gains. The capabilities of the proposed bioinspired robot design and its novel closed-loop perching controller have been successfully demonstrated with perched landings on a human hand.
Additional Information
© 2013 IEEE. Manuscript received June 3, 2013; accepted June 12, 2013. Date of publication July 3, 2013; date of current version September 30, 2013. This paper was recommended for publication by Associate Editor S. Carpin and Editor B. J. Nelson upon evaluation of the reviewers' comments. This work was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under Grant FA95500910089 and the National Science Foundation under Grant IIS-1253758. The concept of wing articulation was presented to the authors by Dr. G. Abate at AFRL. N. Gandhi, X. Shi, and C. Woodruff helped build the aircraft and also participated in the experiments. Their contributions are gratefully acknowledged. The authors would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers whose constructive criticism and comments helped mold this paper into its present form.Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 73121
- DOI
- 10.1109/TRO.2013.2268947
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20161222-073434259
- FA95500910089
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR)
- IIS-1253758
- NSF
- Created
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2016-12-22Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-11Created from EPrint's last_modified field
- Caltech groups
- GALCIT