Crowding and Mutation Improvements in an EA for Flight Control Correction in a Flapping-Wing Vehicle.

Small Flapping-Wing Micro Air Vehicles (FW-MA Vs) may be subjected to either or both of manufacturing defects or in-service damage that render their pre-designed controllers less than adequately effective. Even minor damage to wings, for example, can remove the vehicle's ability to reliably follow waypoint trails even if that same damage does not result in a catastrophic loss of altitude. One solution to this problem is to adapt the core wing motion scripts (wing gaits) in an attempt to use wing motion to compensate for losses of force and torque generation due to in-service damage or manufacturing faults. This approach presents a number of challenges - especially if it is to be deployed in a resource restricted vehicle in an online mode during an actual mission. Prior to this paper, we had presented only anecdotal treatment of fully unrestricted, 3D flight. In this paper, we will definitively establish the utility of EA adaptation of flight control in unrestricted flight in a pendulum-stable FW-MA V. We will, additionally, introduce mutation and crowding modifications that provide demonstrable utility in a manner amenable to implementation on a resource-restricted micro vehicle. The paper will conclude with a discussion of open-issues and the potential application of the reported methods to other problems.