A Multi-body Control Approach for Flapping Wing Micro Aerial Vehicles

Flapping wing micro aerial vehicle (FWMAV) has a multi-body and periodic dynamics, which is influenced by unsteady aerodynamics. These features make it more difficult to control. Ignoring of the wing inertia, dynamics averaging, and using a simple aerodynamic model are the simplifying assumptions for conventional model-based control, although they may result in inaccurate control. To overcome these difficulties, a multi-body control is proposed based on a model-free adaptive variable structure control (MFAVSC) approach. This is one of the first frameworks for multi-body control of FWMAV. This is the first proposed method for the FWMAV control, which considers multi-body, nonlinear and time-varying dynamics as well as main aerodynamic characteristics in an integrated framework. MFAVSC takes advantage of input/output data, while not including any explicit model information. At first, the nonlinear FWMAV dynamics is transformed into an equivalent dynamic linearization description with a concept called pseudo-partial derivative (PPD). After estimating the PPD matrix, model-free adaptive control law is designed based on the optimal criteria. Then, it is augmented by a variable structure control term to guarantee the stability, as well as speeding up its convergence. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme to trajectory control of the FWMAV