Indoor Autonomous Flight of Ornithopter using Motion Capture System

Abstract

This paper presents an indoor autonomous flight test result of an ornithopter using a novel motion capture system. The ornithopter tested has no on-board sensor and processor for state estimation or feedback control. Instead, passive markers attached to the ornithopter reflects the IR light of the multiple strobing CCD cameras, and the time histories of the marker set are streamed to the ground station in real-time. The flight dynamics of ornithopter includes the mixture of complex aerodynamics and flexible multibody dynamics. Hence, the control matrix in system model inherently has uncertainty. Moreover, the ornithopter is highly underactuated system which has only two control channels. To overcome these issues, proportional feedback controllers with scheduled gains are designed and implemented to the control system. The ornithopter platform successfully performed a circular-path flight in a confined area with the constant radius and altitude.