Model identification and attitude control scheme for a micromechanical flying insect

This paper describes recent development on the design of the flight control system for a micromechanical flying insect (MFI), a 10-25 mm (wingtip-to-wingtip) device capable of sustained autonomous flight. High level attitude control is considered. Based on our previous work, in which the complex time-varying component of aerodynamic forces are treated as external disturbances, a nominal state-space linear time-invariant model in hover is developed through linear estimation. The identified model is validated through the virtual insect flight simulator (VIFS), and is used to design feedback controllers for the MFI. A LQG controller is designed and compared with a PD controller. The identification scheme provides a more systematic way of treating aerodynamic modeling errors, and the controllers designed based on the identified model shows better overall performance in simulation. Another advantage of this approach is that measurement of the instantaneous aerodynamic forces is not necessary, thus simplifies the experimental setup for the real MFI.