Tail-MAV: Design and Control of a Perching Micro Aerial Vehicle Inspired by the tail-suspended behavior of primates

To address the challenge of achieving rapid, stable, and passively triggered perching in complex environments without requiring precise alignment, a bioinspired micro air vehicle named Tail-MAV is developed. The system features a bistable mechanism that mimics the tail-hanging behavior of primates, enabling attachment within 100 milliseconds. An adaptive back- stepping controller integrated with a dual-time-scale disturbance observer (AB-DTDO) is then designed to enhance control performance during dynamic flight and perching through real-time disturbance estimation and compensation. Experimental results demonstrate that Tail-MAV achieves reliable perching across diverse substrates and exhibits improved trajectory tracking during agile flight. Compared with the LADRC and PID controllers respectively, the AB-DTDO method reduces the average tracking error by 22.3% and 47.6% respectively, significantly improving the control accuracy and robustness.