Active disturbance rejection attitude control for the dove flapping wing micro air vehicle in intermittent flapping and gliding flight

This paper proposes an attitude control scheme for the Dove flapping wing micro air vehicle in intermittent flapping and gliding flight. The Dove flapping wing micro air vehicle adopts intermittent flapping and gliding flight to make the wing movements more natural; this strategy also has the potential to reduce energy consumption. To implement this specific flight mode, this paper proposes a closed-loop active disturbance rejection control strategy to stabilize the attitude during the processes of flapping flight, transition and gliding flight. The active disturbance rejection control controller is composed of three parts: a tracking differentiator, a linear extended state observer and a nonlinear state error feedback controller. The tracking differentiator estimates the given target signal and the differential signal in real time. The extended state observer estimates the system states and system nonlinearity. Moreover, the bandwidth parameterization method is applied to determine the observer gains. The stability of the closed-loop system is verified using Lyapunov’s theorem. Several outdoor flight experiments have been conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control method, and the results show that the proposed method can guarantee the stability of intermittent flapping and gliding flight.