Adaptive pole placement pitch angle control of a flapping-wing flying robot. (17th August 2016) - Chand, A. N.
Graphical Abstract: Abstract : An adaptive pole placement control scheme for the adaptive pitch angle control of a bird-like flapping-wing flying robot is designed and implemented. The salient aims of this work are notably twofold: first, since the dynamics of bird-like flapping-wing robots are still not well understood and hence obfuscate the process of deriving a high-fidelity aerodynamical model, we instead elect to designate the system identification component of the control scheme to provide real-time estimates of the low level robot parameters. Input and output data are collated during flight and the recursive least squares method is applied to obtain real-time parameter estimates. Estimated parameters are subsequently used in designing the control law using adaptive pole placement via the polynomial method where we prescribe the desired closed-loop characteristic equation. Secondly, even if the dynamics of the robot varies over time, it is accounted by the adaptive controller without any need to perform tuning since proportional gain values are spontaneously generated. Numerical simulations are first used to assist the design and validate the correct operation of the control scheme. It is then implemented on a real bird-like flapping-wing flying robot; experimental results obtained exhibit close congruence with simulation results.