An Autonomous Flight Control Strategy Based on Human-Skill Imitation for Flapping-Wing Aerial Vehicle

Flapping wing aerial vehicle (FAV) is an aircraft that imitate the flying of birds or insects. Comparing with fixing wing and rotary wing vehicles, FAV is hard to control precisely, because of its inherent vibration and complex dynamic analysis. Therefore, most FAV are controlled by human manipulators. In this paper, we mainly focus on studying the experience of human manipulators, using the experience to control our FAV, also known as HITHawk. We call this control strategy human-skill imitation. Human-skill imitation divides flying stages into three parts, which are takeoff, landing, and cruise. Each stage has its own control logic to fly HITHawk in better performance and safer situation. After that, we test each stage of HITHawk to fly in the air. The takeoff stage needs to climb to expect altitude as soon as possible. The cruise stage needs to fly in a set circle track. HITHawk knows how to keep in the trajectory and go back in case of flying away from the circle. Due to HITHawk's characteristic, it cannot be controlled the pitch downward to prevent diving while landing. Therefore, the landing stage needs to control the throttle to float and descent until touching the ground.