Research on adaptive cascade control switching method of flapping-wing aircraft based on disturbance quantization parameter k and PID architecture

Aiming at the control problems of strong nonlinearity, multi-channel coupling and complex aerodynamic disturbance of flapping-wing aircraft, this study proposes an environment-adaptive cascade control switching method based on the PID architecture. A physical control closed-loop is established using MWORKS.Sysplorer, with classical PID as the outer main loop and PID, nonlinear compensation PID, and SMC as the inner loop to form a nested structure, which is cross-validated via MATLAB/Simulink. Through the disturbance quantization parameter k, operating conditions are classified into high, medium, and low disturbances for strategy switching. At the classical flapping frequency of 15 Hz, the proposed method converges the attitude error to within 0.06 rad, improves the anti-disturbance performance under high disturbance by 46.2% compared with traditional PID, constrains the phase lag to the stable interval corresponding to the natural frequency of 50 rad/s, and optimizes computational efficiency with the average single-step simulation time ≤ 0.02 s. This method addresses the insufficient full-working-condition adaptability of traditional single control strategies, and provides a highly robust implementation approach for the control of flapping-wing aircraft under complex disturbances.