Design Analysis, Modelling and Experimental Validation of a Bird-like Flapping-Wing Flying Robot

The design of a relatively new genre of aerial robots — a full-scale, bird-like flapping wing flying robot — is analyzed, modelled and validated through real experiments in this paper. Quaternions are used instead of Euler angles in the dynamical model to represent the flying robot orientation in 3D space in order to realize smoother rotational manoeuvres using spherical linear interpolation. Effect of the control surfaces on the rotational behaviour of the flying robot is used to deduce the moments induced. The moments are then used to determine the angular accelerations, rates and orientation of the robot body in 3D space. Aerodynamic forces acting are then used to model the translational motion of the robot. For this, we propose practical methods of estimating the lift and propulsion generated by the flapping wings of the flying robot. The robot model is first simulated in a virtual environment to realize basic yawing and pitching manoeuvres and real experiments are conducted subsequently. Simulated motion corroborates with the real sensor data and gives an insight into the type of future controllers that ought to be designed.