Design, modeling and disturbance rejection control of a bio-inspired coaxial helicopter MAV in Atmospheric Boundary Layer

The paper presents the research progress on the disturbance rejection of Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) in Atmospheric Boundary Layer (ABL) area. The reaction torque of a bio-inspired reaction wheel mechanism inspired by active flight stabilization of Manduca sexta is applied to attenuate the disturbance resulted from unsteady flow fields. The advantage of using this mechanism is to help to recover the MAV posture quickly by applying reaction torque to attenuate the perturbed angle of the coaxial helicopter MAV flying in unsteady wind environments. Another advantage of adopting reaction wheel in coaxial helicopter is that it will replace traditional stabilizer bar or flyer bar to greatly stabilize flying attitude as well as to reduce the structure complexity and volume size induced by stabilizer bars or flyer bars. In this paper, we start to study the dynamic model and disturbance reject performance of stabilizer bar on the micro helicopter. To compare with stabilizer bars, the wind resistance reaction wheels were designed and a novel bio-inspired coaxial helicopter structure with the reaction wheel stabilization mechanism is presented. In addition, its nonlinear and linear dynamic models are derived by Lagrange method. Based on the established models, the PID controller is designed for reaction wheel stabilization system and dynamic responses of the actively controlled system are then extensively studied through simulations. Preliminary results verify the disturbance rejection and control performance of the bio-inspired reaction wheel stabilization mechanism.