Maintaining stable flight of micro aerial vehicles is challenging, especially in complex, low-Reynolds-number flight environments while considering wind gust disturbance, flow separation, and flow reattachment. To date, most micro aerial vehicles use vision, inertial measurement units, and/or global positioning systems as their primary sensing and navigation devices; however, actual flow conditions over the aircraft wing surfaces cannot be captured directly. In this paper, a biologically inspired micro aerial vehicle pitch control system is designed using distributed pressure information. The pressure information on the wing surfaces of a micro aerial vehicle is directly measured by a array of digital barometric micropressure sensors and is then used to calculate the aerodynamic forces, center of pressure, pitching moment, etc. A new pitch motion model that can capture the pressure information is derived from the control perspective. A nonlinear controller is also designed to achieve accurate pitch control, which is robust with respect to bounded uncertainties and unmodeled dynamics. It is anticipated that this new micro aerial vehicle design, which uses real-time sensed pressure information, can significantly enhance the stability and agility of micro aerial vehicles.


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    Title :

    Pitch Control of a Micro Air Vehicle with Micropressure Sensors


    Contributors:
    Shen, He (author) / Xu, Yunjun (author) / Remeikas, Charles (author)

    Published in:

    Journal of Aircraft ; 50 , 1 ; 239-248


    Publication date :

    2012-12-17


    Size :

    10 pages




    Type of media :

    Article (Journal)


    Type of material :

    Electronic Resource


    Language :

    English