Pitch Control of a Micro Air Vehicle with Micropressure Sensors

Maintaining stable flight of micro aerial vehicles is challenging, especially in complex, low-Reynolds-number flight environments while considering wind gust disturbance, flow separation, and flow reattachment. To date, most micro aerial vehicles use vision, inertial measurement units, and/or global positioning systems as their primary sensing and navigation devices; however, actual flow conditions over the aircraft wing surfaces cannot be captured directly. In this paper, a biologically inspired micro aerial vehicle pitch control system is designed using distributed pressure information. The pressure information on the wing surfaces of a micro aerial vehicle is directly measured by a array of digital barometric micropressure sensors and is then used to calculate the aerodynamic forces, center of pressure, pitching moment, etc. A new pitch motion model that can capture the pressure information is derived from the control perspective. A nonlinear controller is also designed to achieve accurate pitch contro...