The Embedded On-Board Controller and Ground Monitoring System of a Flapping-Wing Aerial Vehicle

A flapping-wing aerial vehicle (FAV), which imitates the flapping flying of birds and can actively adapt to complex aerodynamic environments. Thus, it has better adaptive capacity compared with traditional aircraft. To fabricate a prototype with excellent performance, the design of on-board avionics and ground monitoring and control system (GCS) is very important, except for good structure and mechanisms. In this paper, we developed the embedded on-board controller and ground monitoring system. The former has high power density and light weight. It collects and processes the multiple sensor data, including the inertial measurement units (IMU) and GPS on real time. Then, the system state, including the position, attitude, linear and angular velocities are generated using an extended Kalman filter. Correspondingly, the flight attitude and direction of the robotic bird are adjusted by the combined motion of the wing and tail driving mechanism. To obtain the inspection data supplied by the flying robotic bird, and monitor its flying status (especially the health and sate status) on real time, a ground operation platform was also developed. The ZigBee wireless communication module was used to establish the link between the on-board controller and the ground platform. Finally, various experiments were conducted. The results showed that the developed on-board controller and ground monitor worked very well.