Bounding Flight Control of Dynamic Morphing Wings

Vertebrate flyers perform intermittent flights as bounding or oscillating flights for power management. Intermittent flights and the resulting oscillating height during flapping and soaring provide the means of increasing speed without increasing flapping speed. These maneuvers and their robotic biomimicry have remained unexplored so far, which, if understood, can lead to aerial robot designs with endured flight operations. This works attempts to achieve robotic bounding flight using Northeastern’s Aerobat platform. Aerobat can dynamically morph its wings by collapsing them rapidly during each gaitcycle. We present a launcher designed that allows bounding flight experimentation of Aerobat in a computer-aided fashion. We augmented Aerobat with a plural tiny thruster to stabilize its unstable roll, pitch, and yaw dynamics. This paper presents our control design based on extending Aerobat’s states to accommodate unobservable aerodynamic forces and offers experimental results to support our proposed approach.