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

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.