Interest in flapping wing micro air vehicles (FWMAVs) has grown in recent years. Considerable research has been invested in the areas of unsteady and low Re aerodynamics, as well as techniques to fabricate the small scale components. Control of these vehicles has been less studied and most control techniques proposed have only been implemented within simulations. In this work, power efficiency versus fiapping frequency is studied and shown to be maximized while fiapping at system resonance. Then a resonant fiapping control scheme, Bi-harmonic Amplitude and Bias Modulation (BABM), was used with prototype hardware to demonstrate closed-loop control in a variety of constrained configurations. This work is important in the development and understanding of eventual non-tethered flight capable FWMAVs.
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