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Department of Aerospace Engineering Phone: (301) 405-4182 |
E-mail: jgrauer (at) umd.edu
Dynamics and control of exotic vehicles, system identification, avionics development Dissertation Title: Modeling of Flapping-Wing Ornithopter Dynamics for State Estimation and Control Abstract: Flapping-wing flight vehicles which mimic avian gaits, or ornithopters, are receiving growing interest as an alternative to conventional vehicle designs for autonomously performing civil applications such as crop surveying and wildlife population monitoring, as well as military missions including surveillance and reconnaissance. Vital to the achievement of these goals is the development of an appropriate model of the flight dynamics to facilitate the design of state estimators and flight controllers. This work describes the modeling efforts undertaken to describe the dynamics of an ornithopter with a four foot wingspan. Large pitch rates and heave accelerations measured during flight, as well as significant variations in the mass distribution while flapping, has necessitated the use of a nonlinear multibody model of the flight dynamics, which has been cast in a canonical form convenient for simulation, system identification, state estimation, and feedback control.
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J. Sean Humbert, Ph.D. |
Jared Grauer
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