Control Board Design for a Directly Motor-Driven Flapping MAV

Electronic control boards to drive and manipulate a FWMAV (Flapping Wing Micro Air Vehicle) are proposed in this paper. The flapping wings of the proposed FWMAV are driven directly by two DC motors and extension springs are used to store and release inertial energy at each flapping direction inverting. To get better energy efficiency, the natural frequency of flapping wings can be adjusted by tuning spring constant and transmission gear ratio. Control board circuit and motor driver board circuit are designed in customized PCB (Printed Circuit Board). The control board includes a MCU (Micro Controller Unit) as well as an IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) and voltage regulators. The motor driver board is designed with two small motor driver chips and zener diodes to generate reference voltage level for motor driver chips. Flapping wings are controlled individually by independent motor drivers. The synchronization of the two wings is obtained by synchronizing control signals. The offsets, amplitudes, and phases of the two wings are controlled individually to generate control forces for pitch, roll, and yaw respectively. To test the performance of the designed control board and motor driver board, a simple FWMAV is designed and fabricated. Basic functional tests including input scale factor and thrust generation are done using the control board. It is shown that the prototype FWMAV works well as expected to generate roll, pitch, yaw control forces and thrust for flight.