Design and stability analysis of an optic flow controller for the hover of the atalanta flapping wing micro aerial vehicle

Abstract

Over the past decades the increased use of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAV's) in a large range of fields and applications has lead to a call for more energy efficient MAV's. Here Flapping Wing Micro Aerial Vehicles (FWMAV's) offer the possible solution since it was shown that animals such as colibris and insects have very energy efficient flight mechanics. The drawback of these currently developed FWMAV's is that they have limited lift generation. This limits the energy that can be carried in the form of batteries. This posses limits on the amount of energy that can be spent on both control and sensing. One solution is to use insect inspired optic flow sensors and a simplistic control method to directly control the velocity, instead of using the standard acceleration and GPS measurements. The insect inspired optic flow sensors allow for the measuring of velocity over distance relation. This method allows for a controller to take advantage of the sensor behaviour in order to increase responsiveness close to walls or at high velocities without need for complex control methods. With this goal in mind, two different sensor control variations were developed and tested in a simulation environment. Here the effect of different parameters and conditions were studied and analysed in order to evaluate the effectiveness and potential of these controllers and the general control approach. Analysis show that the behaviour of both controller respond slightly differently on the change in the initial position for a given initial velocity. The implementation of a more realistic sensor did result in different behaviours for certain initial conditions.