A novel tube-launched UAV with vertical takeoff and landing capability
Project Overview
This project involves the development of a Tube-Launched VTOL UAV capable of both vertical takeoff and landing, as well as fixed-wing flight. The platform combines the advantages of tube-launched deployment with VTOL capabilities, enabling versatile mission profiles. This work is published in International Journal of Micro Air Vehicles (Cai et al., 2024).
Left: The complete Tube-Launched VTOL UAV platform. Right: Design layout showing key components and configurations.
Bird-sized flapping-wing robots offer significant potential for agile flight in complex environments, but achieving agile and robust trajectory tracking remains a challenge due to the complex aerodynamics and highly nonlinear dynamics inherent in flapping-wing flight. In this work, a learning-based control approach is introduced to unlock the versatility and adaptiveness of flapping-wing flight. We propose a model-free reinforcement learning (RL)-based framework for a high degree-of-freedom (DoF) bird-inspired flapping-wing robot that allows for multimodal flight and agile trajectory tracking. Stability analysis was performed on the closed-loop system comprising of the flapping-wing system and the RL policy. Additionally, simulation results demonstrate that the RL-based controller can successfully learn complex wing trajectory patterns, achieve stable flight, switch between flight modes spontaneously, and track different trajectories under various aerodynamic conditions.
@article{cai2024learning,title={Learning-based Trajectory Tracking for Bird-inspired Flapping-Wing Robots},author={Cai, Jiaze and Sangli, Vishnu and Kim, Mintae and Sreenath, Koushil},year={2024},eprint={2411.15130},archiveprefix={arXiv},primaryclass={cs.RO},}
