Implementation of a Flapping Wing Micro Air Vehicle Control Technique

摘要

Flapping wing micro air vehicles continue to be a growing field, with ongoing research into unsteady, low Reynolds number aerodynamics, microfabrication, and fluid-structure interaction. However, research into flapping wing control of such micro air vehicles continues to lag. Existing research uniformly consists of proposed control laws that are validated by computer simulations of quasi-steady blade-element formulas. Such simulations use numerous assumptions and cannot be trusted to fully describe the flow physics. Instead, such control laws must be validated on hardware. In earlier work, a novel control technique, biharmonic amplitude and bias modulation, was proposed and analyzed with these same quasi-steady blade-element formulas. In this work, the biharmonic amplitude and bias modulation control technique was implemented on a flapping wing prototype (4 cm wing length) and tested on a six-component force/torque sensor. Experiments verified that the prototype can generate nearly uncoupled forces and moments for motion in five degrees of freedom when using the biharmonic amplitude and bias modulation control technique, and that these forces can be reasonably predicted by the blade-element formulas.