Dynamic Assessment and Control of Insect-Inspired, Perching Micro Aerial Vehicles

This work presents an approach for modeling medium-size flapping-wing micro aerial vehicles carrying heavy payloads, using a cosimulation of ADAMS and MATLAB ® /Simulink, which the authors validated using flight-test data. The drone used for their investigations is the Nimble+ produced by Flapper Drones. It carries a gripper, which can be used for perching in order to save battery consumption during longer missions, or to carry objects. The additional component increases the overall weight by approximately 50% and leads to instability in the control. To examine how the gripper influences the system dynamics, the system is simulated in its clean, gripperless configuration as well as with the gripper attached, and the system dynamics are extracted using linear least-squares fitting. These results are then used to tune an existing baseline Proportional-Integral-Derivative (PID) controller and to develop a Modified Linear Extended State Observer as a new model-based control approach.