Maintaining stable flight during high turbulence intensities is challenging for fixed-wing micro air vehicles (MAV). Two methods are proposed to improve the disturbance rejection performance of the MAV: incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion (INDI) control and phaseadvanced pitch probes. INDI uses the angular acceleration measurements to counteract disturbances. Multihole pressure probes measure the incoming flow angle and velocity ahead of the wing in order to react to gusts before an inertial response has occurred. The performance of INDI is compared to a traditional proportional integral derivative (PID) controller with and without the multihole pressure probes. The attitude controllers are tested by performing autonomous wind tunnel flights and stability augmented outdoor flights. This paper shows that INDI improves the disturbance rejection performance of fixed-wing MAVs compared to traditional proportional integral derivative controllers.

The group was assigned to design a swarm of hybrid micro air vehicles to compete in the IMAV 2013 outdoors competition. The swarm should be able to perform several mission elements and cooperate within the swarm.