Flight control of an insect-like tailless flapping wing nano-robot around hover

This work describes a control system for a tailless insect-like flapping wing aerial vehicle. The control system is initially implemented in simulation. An experimentally validated rigid wing quasi-steady aerodynamics model represents the vehicle flight dynamics in simulation. A cascaded PID architecture is used to control vehicle flight velocity and attitude. The PID tuning process is automated through a constrained nonlinear optimization process. The attitude estimation process uses onboard accelerometer and gyroscope readings. The accelerometer readings require a low-pass filter to ignore noise from flapping wing related body pitching oscillations. The performance of a complementary filter and extended Kalman filter are considered for the attitude estimation strategy. The flight simulation controller successfully stabilizes the vehicle attitude and follows reference flight maneuvers around hover. The attitude estimation and attitude controller are verified experimentally on a single cage gimbal setup that isolates one rotational degree of freedom. The drone stabilizes itself around the upright position, and successfully maintains a reference attitude.