An Instrumented Flight Test of Flapping Micro Air Vehicles Using a Tracking System

A flapping-type micro air vehicle(MAV) is one of the vehicles attracting the MAV engineers for its diverse capabilities such as agility, perching and even hover that are advantageous when performing missions in varying environments. While the flapping MAV has a history of research and development, it has considerably been relying on developers' trial and errors, and empirical skills. Particularly in test and evaluation phase of development which is crucial for the assessment and evolution of vehicle performance, much of it has been done by visual observation of the vehicle flight and the following subjective estimation. This paper presents the procedure and resulting achievement of an instrumented flight test performed on the flapping MAVs that are being developed by the authors. Performed in an indoor flight test facility for the exclusive use of MAVs equipped with Vicon motion capture system[1] and tracking cameras, spatial position and orientation data were acquired from the flying vehicles with tracking markers attached. With their proper derivatives and investigation, a quantitative analysis was carried out for the assessment of vehicle performance parameters.