Free flight simulations and pitch and roll control experiments of a sub-gram flapping-flight micro aerial vehicle

Flapping-flight micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) pose an ongoing design problem to the scientific community, requiring careful consideration of both body structure and force production. Here, we examine a flapping MAV prototype with a passively rotating wing design. While at the current scale the lift force produced is not enough for liftoff, observing its performance under roll and pitch control can lead to insights on both the body design and the eventual free-flight implementation. As the production of roll and pitch torques are primarily uncoupled for this design, PID control is implemented in the roll and pitch directions individually on a custom designed single degree of freedom rig. By doing so, we show that the body structure is capable of sustaining independent wing amplitudes and that actuator input voltage bias shifting is successful experimentally on a dynamically driven wing. Through force compensation, the experimentally tested controller is mapped to a 1/2 scale simulated system, theoretically capable of free-flight. Though initial simulation results suggest high sensitivity to feedback noise, simulations show that decoupled roll and pitch controllers have potential as a minimal computational means for hovering and translational motion.