Flying With Damaged Wings: The Effect on Flight Capacity and Bio-Inspired Coping Strategies of a Flapping Wing Robot

Insects wings are subject to wear and tear from collisions and environmental disturbances during flight. They can tolerate both symmetrical and asymmetrical wing damages while maintaining flight capability to some extent. Drawing inspiration from nature's adaptation capabilities, we investigated the consequences of wing damage on a flapping wing micro air vehicle by quantifying the changes in wing kinematics, lift generation, control torque offset, and aerodynamic damping variations in flight tests with intact and damaged wings. For the proposed vehicle, the wing damage affected the lift generation significantly. Compared to the intact wings, the damaged ones result in increased stroke angle amplitude in order to compensate for lift loss and torque imbalance, which causes an increase in power consumption accordingly. Furthermore, asymmetric damages usually require a larger amount of additional control effort for flight stabilization compared to symmetric cases. In addition, aerodynamic damping varies as the wing areas change. All these aspects pose challenges in flight control. An adaptive controller is proposed to cope with the wing damage induced detrimental effects on flight capacity. Flight tests were conducted to validate the control performance. As a result, the robot can effectively overcome such challenges even in the case of a maximum unilateral lift loss of up to ≈22%. Such a result matches the performance of hovering hawkmoths, which can handle torque asymmetry up to 22.3 ± 7.8%. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of FWMAVs to handle significant wing asymmetry in hover flight.