First Experimental Demonstration of Natural Hovering Extremum Seeking: A New Paradigm in Flapping Flight Physics
This work provides experimental validation of a new paradigm for flapping flight control, potentially simplifying the design of insect-like drones by eliminating the need for complex models and sensors.
The paper presents the first experimental demonstration of Natural Hovering Extremum Seeking (NH-ES), a model-free feedback mechanism that enables stable hovering in flapping-wing robots using only local light intensity measurements, achieving autonomous altitude stabilization and robustness to delays and noise.
In this letter, we report the first experimental demonstration of the recently emerged new paradigm in hovering and flapping flight physics called (Natural Hovering Extremum Seeking (NH-ES)) [doi.org/10.1103/4dm4-kc4g], which theorized that stable hovering flight physics observed in nature by flapping insects and hummingbirds can be generated via a model-free, real-time, computationally-basic, sensory-based feedback mechanism that only needs the built-in natural oscillations of the flapping wing as both the control and the propulsive input. We run experiments of moth-like, light source-seeking, on a flapping-wing body in a total model-free setting that is agnostic to morphological parameters and body/aerodynamic models. We show that the flapping body using NH-ES gains altitude and stabilizes autonomously the servos responsible for flapping, including with pitching dynamics (believed in literature to be a main reason of instability in open-loop hovering). The flapping body effectively/stably hovers about the light source, needing only feedback of local measurements of light intensity. Our results were also achieved under delay/noise effects, supporting earlier observations that NH-ES is robust against potential processing delays and noisy-sensations.