Autonomous Control Design for a Two-Wing Tailless Flapping-Wing Micro Air Vehicle System

In recent years, there has been an increasing number of interests in flapping-wing micro aerial vehicles (FW-MAVs). This type of MAV has low power consumption and long flight times due to the flapping wing design. However, these designs have inherent instability, due to having only two control surfaces, which are also responsible for providing lift. This work attempts to implement a flight control system (FCS) for a two-wing tailless FW-MAV using linear control techniques. In this paper, a linear FCS using Proportional, Integral and Derivative (PID) control techniques is implemented on a simulated two-wing tailless FW-MAV. The simulation is enabled with a real-world physics engine to emulate the flight characteristics of the physical FW-MAV. Testing and optimisation in the simulation demonstrates the feasibility of the FCS to produce controller gains capable of achieving stable flight in a physical FW-MAV. This work approves the stability of the designed FCS in the simulation and provides a feasible example of a linear FCS system for physical implementation. This work supports the deployment of maintainable FW-MAVs without complex non-linear control systems.