Development of insect-inspired flight control strategies, with a focus on wind gusts rejection. A collaboration with Experimental Zoology group at Wageningen UR, funded by NWO-TTW.
The end goal of this 4-year project, launched in 2017, is to develop a tail-less flapping wing robot with good wind-gust-rejection capabilities. At MAVLab, TU Delft, we are focusing on the design of bio-inspired wing-actuation mechanisms as well as on bio-inspired control algorithms. Our collaborators at the Experimental Zoology group at Wageningen UR use high-speed cameras to study the response of bumblebees and blowflies to various types wind gusts. This will provide new insights into the interplay between the sensory systems and the control architecture used in gust mitigation, which will be validated with the developed flapping wing robot carrying comparable sensors.