Modeling Synchronous Muscle Function in Insect Flight: a Bio-Inspired Approach to Force Control in Flapping-Wing MAVs

Micro-aerial vehicles (MAV) and their promising applications—such as undetected surveillance or exploration of environments with little space for land-based maneuvers—are a wellknown topic in the field of aerial robotics. Inspired by high maneuverability and agile flight of insects, over the past two decades a significant amount of effort has been dedicated to research on flappingwing MAVs, most of which aim to address unique challenges in morphological construction, force production, and control strategy. Although remarkable solutions have been found for sufficient lift generation, effective methods for motion control still remain an open problem. The focus of this paper is to investigate general flight control mechanisms that are potentially used by real insects, thereby providing inspirations for flappingwing MAV control. Through modeling the insect flight muscles, we show that stiffness and set point Original Work Presented at 2012 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS’12). H. Mahjoubi (B) · K. Byl Robotics Laboratory, Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California at Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA e-mail: [email protected] K. Byl e-mail: [email protected] of the wing’s joint can be respectively tuned to regulate the wing’s lift and thrust forces. Therefore, employing a suitable controller with variable impedance actuators at each wing joint is a prospective approach to agile flight control of insect-inspired MAVs. The results of simulated flight experiments with one such controller are provided and support our claim.