An Experimental Method for Dynamic Modeling of Hover-capable Tailless Flapping-wing Micro Air Vehicles

Despite the exceptional maneuverability of hover-capable tailless flapping-wing micro air vehicles, the inherent complexity of their unsteady aerodynamics poses significant challenges for developing precise dynamic models for controller design. To address this, this paper proposes ground-based damping pendulum experiments to construct a full damping dynamic model that incorporates parasitic drag damping. The parasitic drag damping is decoupled from flapping-induced damping by experimentally measuring the damping coefficients across three configurations: with wings and flapping, with wings and no flapping, and without wings. Quantitative analysis reveals that, compared with a model that considers only flapping-induced damping, the full damping dynamic model predicts the oscillation periods of longitudinal and lateral unstable modes decrease by 4.27% and 2.24%, respectively. The accuracy of the full damping model is validated by cascaded PID closed-loop control simulations; compared to flight test data, the root-mean-square errors for pitch and roll attitudes are only 1.78° and 2.78°, respectively. Furthermore, this study investigates the influence of wing geometry on aerodynamic derivatives. Results indicate that flapping-induced damping effects increase as the aspect ratio decreases. Finally, an experimentally corrected aerodynamic derivative estimation method is established. This study provides a feasible empirical modeling framework for the conceptual design and controller synthesis of FWMAVs.