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Flight control design of a flapping wing UAV flying in gusts inspired from covert feathers of birds

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Abstract

Flapping wings provide a theoretically energy efficient mode of lift and maneuverability in Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) for a wide variety of applications. However, their performance is significantly degraded in presence of turbulence. In order to address this problem of turbulence, motivated by the covert feathers present in birds, this paper presents a multibody Bond Graph Model (BGM) of a biologically inspired Flapping Wing UAV (FUAV) capable of flight in turbulent airflows. To further simplify computations and carry out stability analyses, Reduced Order Modeling (ROM) of the multibody model is offered. For the proposed multibody FUAV, a biomimetic closed loop Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) based flight controller is created in order to achieve stable flight during gusts. A successful gust mitigation of up to 32% is shown in simulations of the optimized model and proposed control approach, which consistently show stable behavior under turbulent flight. Furthermore, the accuracy and effectiveness of the suggested control approach is confirmed by the strong agreement between previously published experimental data and the present findings.

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Data availability

Data and material that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, SS CASE IT, Islamabad, Pakistan

    S. H. Abbasi & A. Mahmood

  2. University of Engineering and Technology, Taxila, Pakistan

    Kanwal Waqar

  3. National University of Science and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, Pakistan

    Muhammad Imran

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  1. S. H. Abbasi
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  2. Kanwal Waqar
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  3. A. Mahmood
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  4. Muhammad Imran
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Contributions

S. H. Abbasi: Study, conception and design, modeling and simulation, manuscript preparation.

Kanwal Waqar: Reduced order model formulation, stability analysis, manuscript preparation.

A. Mahmood: Overall supervision of research.

Muhammad Imran: Model reduction and controls, manuscript preparation.

All authors reviewed the results and approved the final version of the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to S. H. Abbasi.

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Abbasi, S.H., Waqar, K., Mahmood, A. et al. Flight control design of a flapping wing UAV flying in gusts inspired from covert feathers of birds. J Micro-Bio Robot 19, 47–57 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12213-023-00157-6

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