A novel coaxial ducted fan aerial robot with a manipulator is proposed which can achieve some hover operation tasks in a corner environment, such as switching on and off a wall-attached button on the corner. In order to study the aerodynamic interference between the prototype and the environment when the aerial robot is hovering in the corner environment, a method for the comprehensive modeling of the prototype and corner environment based on the artificial neural network is presented. By using the CFD simulation software, the flow field of the prototype at different positions with the corner effect is analyzed. After determining the input, output and structure of the neural network model, the Adam and gradient descent algorithms are selected as the neural network training algorithms, respectively. In addition, to optimize the initial weights and biases of the neural network model, the genetic algorithm is precisely used. The three-dimensional prediction surfaces generated by the three methods of the neural network, kriging surface and the polynomial fitting are compared. The results show that the neural network has high prediction accuracy, and can be applied to the comprehensive modeling of the prototype and the corner environment.
Keywords: aerodynamic interference; artificial neural network; corner effect; ducted fan.