Lateral mode controller design for insect-like tailless flapping-wing micro air vehicle

In this study, proposed is a PD (Proportional-Derivative) controllerr for the roll and yaw motions based on the linearized and non-coupled lateral mode dynamic model of the flapping-wing micro air vehicle (FW-MAV) called KUBeetle. First, the lateral mode dynamics model is cascaded with the dynamics of the sensors, filters, and servos to obtain more accurate dynamic model. Then, the stability and robustness of the closed loop control system is analyzed using root locus and H∞ norm stability criteria. From the analyses, the robustly stabilizing PD control gains are determined. It is found that the simple PD controller of roll motion has big overshoot and large steady state error, even though the closed loop system is very stable. To improve the roll controller performance, a loop shaping compensator is designed and cascaded to the proportional feedback part of the roll control loop. It is shown that the complex compensator improves the roll response, and it does not affect much the closed loop stability robustness of the roll control loop. The real flight test was done to check the performance of the proposed control loop and it shows that the lateral motion follows the reference command very well as in the simulation. © ICROS 2021.