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Design and Development of a Tailless Robotic Hummingbird

par Roshanbin, ALI
Président du jury Hendrick, Patrick
Promoteur Garone, Emanuele
Co-Promoteur Preumont, André
Publication Non publié, 2019-09-20

Thèse de doctorat

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Résumé :

This thesis describes the design and development of a hovering flapping two-winged robot of the size of a hummingbird (named COLIBRI ). The robot is tailless and the attitude is actively controlled by changing the wing camber with a mechanism known as wing twist modulation. The current version of our robot has a total mass of 23 gr, a wingspan of 21cm and a flapping frequency of 21Hz. The robot has demonstrated a successful hovering flight with on-board batteries and control board. The flight endurance is more than one minute. The thesis provides a detailed explanation of the design of the robot sub-systems, including flapping mechanism, wing aerodynamics, control mechanism, and implemented control algorithm to achieve a sustained precision hovering flight.The first part of the thesis (Chapter 2) explains the development of a string-based flapping mechanism aiming at minimizing the parasitic torques resulting from the asymmetric profile of the wing trajectories. The contribution of leading edge bar flexibility to the wing aerodynamic efficiency and to the noise level of the flapping frame are also investigated by experiments with various leading edge bar diameters. Additionally, the design of the flapping mechanism gearbox for enhancing the flight duration is provided. The performance of the developed flapping mechanism is evaluated using a high speed camera and conducting flight experiments.The development of the wing-based control mechanism is described in Chapter 3. The control mechanism generates control torques around the three axes of the robot by modifying the wing kinematics while minimizing the cross-coupling effects. To achieve this, two architectures of series and parallels mechanisms are investigated. The two mechanisms are mathematically analysed to evaluate their behaviour with respect to cross-coupling effects. The analysis is verified by measuring the control torque characteristics. The effectiveness of the proposed method is explored by flight testing.Three separate control modules are implemented to stabilize the robot and perform the precision hovering flight; two cascade controls for pitch and roll and one PI controller for yaw (Chapter 4). The vertical position of the robot is controlled manually by tuning the flapping frequency. The controllers are tuned using a linearized model around hovering and the robot parameters are identified by bench test experiments. Flight experiments are carried out to assess the controller performance.