Hovering Control of Flapping Wings in Tandem with Multi-Rotors
Aniket Dhole, Bibek Gupta, Adarsh Salagame, Xuejian Niu, Yizhe Xu, Kaushik Venkatesh, Paul Ghanem, Ioannis Mandralis
Abstract
This work briefly covers our efforts to stabilize the flight dynamics of Northeatern's tailless bat-inspired micro aerial vehicle, Aerobat. Flapping robots are not new. A plethora of examples is mainly dominated by insect-style design paradigms that are passively stable. However, Aerobat, in addition for being tailless, possesses morphing wings that add to the inherent complexity of flight control. The robot can dynamically adjust its wing platform configurations during gaitcycles, increasing its efficiency and agility. We employ a guard design with manifold small thrusters to stabilize Aerobat's position and orientation in hovering, a flapping system in tandem with a multi-rotor. For flight control purposes, we take an approach based on assuming the guard cannot observe Aeroat's states. Then, we propose an observer to estimate the unknown states of the guard which are then used for closed-loop hovering control of the Guard-Aerobat platform.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{iros2023_hoveringcontrolo,
title = {Hovering Control of Flapping Wings in Tandem with Multi-Rotors},
author = {Aniket Dhole and Bibek Gupta and Adarsh Salagame and Xuejian Niu and Yizhe Xu and Kaushik Venkatesh and Paul Ghanem and Ioannis Mandralis and Eric Sihite and Alireza Ramezani},
booktitle = {IROS 2023},
year = {2023}
}