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LQR Controller for Stabilization of Bio-Inspired Flapping Wing UAV in Gust Environments

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Abstract

The size of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) makes them very sensitive to atmospheric turbulences thereby restraining their capability of stable flight. To resolve this serious concern, disturbance mitigation capabilities of birds have been studied in depth and it has been found that birds use covert feathers to alleviate gusts. This paper proposes a model of bio-inspired gust mitigation system (GMS) for a flapping wing UAV (FUAV) imitating covert feathers using bond graph modeling approach. Further, reduced order modeling of the GMS is presented for reducing the computational complexity and performing the stability analysis. A biomimetic closed loop flight controller based on LQR is developed for the proposed GMS to achieve stable flight during gusts. Finally, simulations of the optimized model and proposed control strategy always depict stable behavior during turbulent flight with successful gust mitigation up to 50%. Moreover, close agreement between present results and experimental data in literature validates the proposed control method.

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Data Availability

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author, S.H. Abbasi, upon reasonable request.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, SS CASE IT, Islamabad, Pakistan

    S. H. Abbasi, A. Mahmood & A. Khaliq

  2. National University of Science and Technology (NUST), Islamabad, Pakistan

    Muhammad Imran

Authors
  1. S. H. Abbasi
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  2. A. Mahmood
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  3. A. Khaliq
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  4. Muhammad Imran
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Contributions

The study is supervised by Dr. Asif Mahmood Mughal; Methodology, Design, Modeling, Control and the original draft is prepared by Saddam Hussain Abbasi and Dr. Muhammad Imran; Review and editing by Dr. Abdul Khaliq; The results were analyzed and validated by Dr. Asif Mahmood Mughal. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

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Correspondence to S. H. Abbasi.

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Abbasi, S.H., Mahmood, A., Khaliq, A. et al. LQR Controller for Stabilization of Bio-Inspired Flapping Wing UAV in Gust Environments. J Intell Robot Syst 105, 79 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-022-01699-w

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