Motion Control and Planning of a Bio-Inspired Aerial Vehicle with an Actively Controlled Abdomen-Like Appendage

Animals' anatomies have control systems combined with multi-motors and high-bandwidth sensors. Their complicated mechanisms give them high maneuverability with sufficient inertial stabilization performance during walking, jumping, and flying. From the point of aerial locomotion, flying insects use abdomen reflexes to stabilize their head positions. Articulation of the thoracic-abdominal joint contributes to the reorientation of their bodies over the law of conservation of angular momentum. Since acceleration is a fundamental component of maneuverability, increasing the acceleration without destabilizing the body is achieved with additional appendages such as the tail and abdomen. Highly actuated abdominal muscles are an essential feature of these natural flyers, conspicuously missing from the current aerial vehicles regarding maneuverability. This study proposes a bio-inspired aerial vehicle morphology with an actively controlled abdomen-like appendage. We aim to investigate the advantages and disadvantages of the abdomen-like appendage mounted on a bi-rotor aerial vehicle by constructing the dynamical model and designing optimization-based controllers; Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR), Model Predictive Control (MPC), and Adaptive Model Predictive Control (A-MPC). We complete our analysis with a motion planning algorithm by combining the sampling-based neighborhood graph approach with the A-MPC strategy. We demonstrate through simulation experiments that the appendage improves the stability and maneuverability of aerial vehicles and the resulting motion planning structure with A-MPC ensures that the state and input constraints are not violated.