Theoretical and Experimental Investigation on Body Control after Perching for Flapping-Wing Robots: Extending the Workspace for Manipulation

This work investigates a post-perching control for flapping-wing flying robots (FWFRs) to control and move the system on a branch. The flapping-wing aerial systems are lightweight platforms that mimic the birds’ flight and they could serve for monitoring and inspection. The interaction of the FWFRs with the environment needs to fulfill perching on a branch, as a preliminary step, then moving the body to gain access to the desired pose and workspace. The leg of the robot moves the bird to the proper position. This work studies the mathematical modeling, simulation, and experimental implementation of this topic. A three-degree-of-freedom system is presented to model the robot’s body, tail, and leg. A nonlinear controller, so-called feedback linearization (FL) is used for the control of the robot. A linear quadratic regulator (LQR), plus an integrator, are embedded in the FL controller to deliver optimal control for the linearized system. The simulation results show that the actuated leg extends the workspace of the robot significantly and confirms the effectiveness of the proposed strategy for body control. Experimental results present similar behavior of the system using the proposed controller for different desired setpoints.