Vibrational control: A hidden stabilization mechanism in insect flight

Taha, Haitham E.; Kiani, Mohammadali; Hedrick, Tyson L.; Greeter, Jeremy S. M.

doi:10.1126/scirobotics.abb1502

Cited by 70 publications

(34 citation statements)

References 53 publications

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“…Biological fliers with flapping wings are distinguished from rotary and fixedwinged robotic fliers in their ability to exploit the motion of aerodynamic surfaces with substantially larger magnitude and degrees of freedom (DoF) [1][2][3]. Therefore, they excel at flight control using versatile wing kinematics that modulate aerodynamic forces to a greater extent, thereby achieve diverse flight modes and unparalleled flight stability and agility [4][5][6][7][8][9]. Not surprisingly, flapping flight has become an appealing design paradigm for aerial robotics, especially with the recent advancement in miniature electronics and fabrication techniques [10][11][12][13][14].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

State-space aerodynamic model reveals high force control authority and predictability in flapping flight

Bayiz

Cheng

2021

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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Flying animals resort to fast, large-degree-of-freedom motion of flapping wings, a key feature that distinguishes them from rotary or fixed-winged robotic fliers with limited motion of aerodynamic surfaces. However, flapping-wing aerodynamics are characterized by highly unsteady and three-dimensional flows difficult to model or control, and accurate aerodynamic force predictions often rely on expensive computational or experimental methods. Here, we developed a computationally efficient and data-driven state-space model to dynamically map wing kinematics to aerodynamic forces/moments. This model was trained and tested with a total of 548 different flapping-wing motions and surpassed the accuracy and generality of the existing quasi-steady models. This model used 12 states to capture the unsteady and nonlinear fluid effects pertinent to force generation without explicit information of fluid flows. We also provided a comprehensive assessment of the control authority of key wing kinematic variables and found that instantaneous aerodynamic forces/moments were largely predictable by the wing motion history within a half-stroke cycle. Furthermore, the angle of attack, normal acceleration and pitching motion had the strongest effects on the aerodynamic force/moment generation. Our results show that flapping flight inherently offers high force control authority and predictability, which can be key to developing agile and stable aerial fliers.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

State-space aerodynamic model reveals high force control authority and predictability in flapping flight

Bayiz

Cheng

2021

J. R. Soc. Interface.

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“…However, this aerial righting scenario would make an interesting future study in the context of flight behaviour mode transition. Several passive stabilizing mechanisms exist in flapping flight, including flapping counter-torque [9,18] and vibrational stability [25], and further mechanisms have been suggested [26]. These mechanisms resist perturbation and allow active control to correct at a slower time course.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dragondrop: a novel passive mechanism for aerial righting in the dragonfly

2021

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Dragonflies perform dramatic aerial manoeuvres when chasing targets but glide for periods during cruising flights. This makes dragonflies a great system to explore the role of passive stabilizing mechanisms that do not compromise manoeuvrability. We challenged dragonflies by dropping them from selected inverted attitudes and collected 6-degrees-of-freedom aerial recovery kinematics via custom motion capture techniques. From these kinematic data, we performed rigid-body inverse dynamics to reconstruct the forces and torques involved in righting behaviour. We found that inverted dragonflies typically recover themselves with the shortest rotation from the initial body inclination. Additionally, they exhibited a strong tendency to pitch-up with their head leading out of the manoeuvre, despite the lower moment of inertia in the roll axis. Surprisingly, anaesthetized dragonflies could also complete aerial righting reliably. Such passive righting disappeared in recently dead dragonflies but could be partially recovered by waxing their wings to the anaesthetised posture. Our kinematics data, inverse dynamics model and wind-tunnel experiments suggest that the dragonfly's long abdomen and wing posture generate a rotational tendency and passive attitude recovery mechanism during falling. This work demonstrates an aerodynamically stable body configuration in a flying insect and raises new questions in sensorimotor control for small flying systems.

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“…Insects with paired wings are usually assumed as a rigid body (Sun et al 2005;Gao et al 2009;Gao et al 2011), of which the inertial force induced by reciprocating wings is neglected. This assumption is reasonable when the wing beat frequency is high or the wing is light (Sun et al 2007;Taha et al 2020). In addition, many dynamic equations of flapping-wing insects are only applicable to small deviations from equilibrium state (Gao et al 2011;Taha et al 2015;Zhang et al 2018) by neglecting high-order terms, which is not suitable for extreme motions under large perturbations.…”

Section: Flight Dynamic Simulatormentioning

confidence: 99%

A six-degree-of-freedom proportional-derivative control strategy for bumblebee flight stabilization

Cai

Liu

2021

JBSE

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Flying insects perform active flight control with flapping wings by continuously adjusting their wing kinematics in stabilizing the body posture to stay aloft under complex natural environment. While the Proportional Derivative (PD) / Proportional Integral Derivative (PID)-based algorithms have been applied to examine specific single degree of freedom (DoF) and/or 3 DoF flight control associated with insect flights, a full 6 DoF flight control strategy remains yet poorly studied. Here we propose a novel 6 DoF PD controller specified for flight stabilization in flapping flights, in which proportional and derivative gains are optimized to facilitate a fast while precise flight control by combing Laplace transformation and root locus method. The vertical position, yaw, pitch and roll are directly stabilized by tuning the wing kinematics while the forward/backward position and lateral position are indirectly stabilized by controlling the pitch and roll, respectively. Coupled with a recently developed flight dynamic model informed by high-fidelity CFD simulation (Cai et al. 2021), this methodology is proven to be effective as a versatile and efficient tool to achieve fast flight stabilization under both small and large perturbations for bumblebee hovering. The 6 DoF PD flight control strategy proposed may provide a useful bioinspired flight-controller design for flapping-wing micro air vehicles (FWMAVs).

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Vibrational control: A hidden stabilization mechanism in insect flight

Cited by 70 publications

References 53 publications

State-space aerodynamic model reveals high force control authority and predictability in flapping flight

State-space aerodynamic model reveals high force control authority and predictability in flapping flight

Dragondrop: a novel passive mechanism for aerial righting in the dragonfly

A six-degree-of-freedom proportional-derivative control strategy for bumblebee flight stabilization

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