Abstract
The size of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) makes them very sensitive to atmospheric turbulences thereby restraining their capability of stable flight. To resolve this serious concern, disturbance mitigation capabilities of birds have been studied in depth and it has been found that birds use covert feathers to alleviate gusts. This paper proposes a model of bio-inspired gust mitigation system (GMS) for a flapping wing UAV (FUAV) imitating covert feathers using bond graph modeling approach. Further, reduced order modeling of the GMS is presented for reducing the computational complexity and performing the stability analysis. A biomimetic closed loop flight controller based on LQR is developed for the proposed GMS to achieve stable flight during gusts. Finally, simulations of the optimized model and proposed control strategy always depict stable behavior during turbulent flight with successful gust mitigation up to 50%. Moreover, close agreement between present results and experimental data in literature validates the proposed control method.