Biblio

The split-cycle constant-period frequency modulation for flapping wing micro air vehicle control in two degrees of freedom has been proposed and its theoretical viability has been demonstrated in previous work. Further consecutive work on developing the split-cycle based physical control system has been targeted towards providing on-the-fly configurability of all the theoretically possible split-cycle wing control parameters with high fidelity on a physical Flapping Wing Micro Air Vehicle (FWMAV). Extending the physical vehicle and wing-level control modules developed previously, this paper provides the details of the FWMAV platform, that has been designed and assembled to aid other researchers interested in the design, development and analysis of high level flapping flight controllers. Additionally, besides the physical vehicle and the configurable control module, the platform provides numerous external communication access capabilities to conduct and validate various sensor fusion study for flapping flight control.

In previous work, the viability of split-cycle constant-period frequency modulation for controlling two degrees of freedom of flapping wing micro air vehicle has been demonstrated. Though the proposed wing control system was made compact and self-sufficient to be deployed on the vehicle, it was not built for on-the-fly configurability of all the split-cycle control's parameters. Further the system had limited external communication capabilities that rendered it inappropriate for its integration into a higher level research framework to analyze and validate motion controllers in flapping vehicles. In this paper, an improved control system has been proposed that could addresses the on-the-fly configurability issue and provide an improved external communication capabilities, hence the wing control system could be seamlessly integrated in a research framework for analyzing and validating motion controllers for flapping wing vehicles.