Model checking of a flapping-wing mirco-air-vehicle trajectory tracking controller subject to disturbances

Abstract

This paper proposes a model checking method for a trajectory tracking controller for a flapping wing micro-air-vehicle (MAV) under disturbance. Due to the coupling of the continuous vehicle dynamics and the discrete guidance laws, the system is a hybrid system. Existing hybrid model checkers approximate the model by partitioning the continuous state space into invariant regions (flow pipes) through the use of reachable set computations. There are currently no efficient methods for accounting for unknown disturbances to the system. Neglecting disturbances for the trajectory tracking problem underestimates the reachable set and can fail to detect when the system would reach an unsafe condition. For linear systems, we propose the use of the H-infinity norm to augment the flow pipes and account for disturbances. We show that dynamic inversion can be coupled with our method to address the nonlinearities in the flapping-wing control system.