In-flight data acquisition and flight testing for system identification of flapping-wing MAVs

Abstract

Abstract-Although flapping-wing micro aerial vehicles have become a hot topic in academia, the knowledge we have of these systems, their force generation mechanisms and dynamics is still limited. Recent technological advances have allowed for the development of free flight test setups using on-board sensors and external tracking systems, for system identification purposes. Nevertheless, there is still little knowledge about the system requirements, as well as on how to perform free flight test experiments, and process the collected data. The present article presents the guidelines for flapping-wing micro aerial vehicle free flight testing. In particular, it gathers information produced by different studies and provides the best practices for the proper system dimensioning, system setup, on-board sensors, maneuver input design, error analyses and data postprocessing, for the reconstruction of the forces and moments that act during free flight of a flapping-wing robot, for system identification and modeling purposes. Furthermore, this article compares the results obtained using external optical position tracking systems with on-board and external sensor fusion, and provides suitable solutions and methods for data fusion and force reconstruction.

Global Linear Parameter-Varying Modeling of Flapping-Wing Dynamics Using Flight Data

“…C), resulting in 46 local models. In each manoeuvre, elevator doublets were used to excite the system, having been found, in previous work, to provide suitable excitation, and generally to be an effective compromise given the limited testing space and the linear modelling approach [37,35] (for turther discussion of the input design see [35,43]). From each dataset, the parameters (stability and control derivatives) in Eq.…”