Effect of the aerodynamic-induced parametric excitation on the longitudinal stability of hovering MAVs/insects

Longitudinal flight dynamics of hovering micro-air-vehicles and insects is considered. The natural oscillatory flapping motion of the wing leads to time-periodic stability derivatives (aerodynamic loads due to perturbation in the body-motion variables). Hence these terms play the role of parametric excitation on the flight dynamics. The main objective of this work is to assess the effects of these aerodynamic-induced parametric excitation terms that are neglected by the averaging analysis. The method of multiple scales is used to determine a second-order uniform expansion for the response of the time-periodic system at hand. The proposed approach is applied to the hovering flight dynamics of five insects that cover a wide range of operating frequency ratios to assess the applicability of the averaging analysis.