Traditional micro air vehicles (MAVs) are miniature versions of full-scale aircraft from which their design principles closely follow. The first step in aircraft design is the development of a conceptual design, where basic specifications and vehicle size are established. Conceptual design methods do not rely on specific knowledge of the propulsion system, vehicle layout and subsystems; these d...

In this paper, we investigate the aerodynamic aspects of formation flights. We do so by simulating the flow over flapping wings flying in grouping arrangement and in proximity of each others using the unsteady vortex lattice method. The results show that flying in V-shaped line formation at optimal spacing enables significant increase in the lift and thrust and savings in the power consumption....

A computational framework for analyzing and designing efficient flapping flight vehicles is presented. Two computational tools are considered: a Betz Criterion code proposed by Hall et. al., and an accelerated, unsteady, potential flow solver. The parameters considered in this paper are: the flapping frequency, the flapping amplitude in both up-down and forward-aft directions, and the addition ...

This paper investigates the flight mechanics of a micro aerial vehicle without a vertical tail in an effort to reverse-engineer the agility of avian flight. The key to stability and control of such a tailless aircraft lies in the ability to control the incidence angles and dihedral angles of both wings independently. The dihedral angles can be varied symmetrically on both wings to control aircr...

Low Reynolds number aerodynamics is important for various applications including micro-aerial vehicles, sailplanes, leading edge control devices, high-altitude unmanned vehicles, wind turbines and propellers. These flows are generally characterized by the presence of laminar separation bubbles. These bubbles are generally unsteady and have a significant effect on the overall resulting aerodynam...

This paper presents a thorough review on the system identification techniques applied to flapping wing micro air vehicles (FWMAVs). The main advantage of this work is provide solid background and domain knowledge for further investigations in field FWMAVs. In context, systems are first categorized into tailed tailless MAVs. most recent developments related such reported. used FWMAVs can be clas...

This paper presents experimental micro aerial vehicle (MAV) research with low-frequency flapping and articulated wing gliding. The importance of phase difference control via an abstract mathematical model of central pattern generators (CPGs) is confirmed with a robotic bat on a 3-DOF pendulum platform. An aerodynamic model for the robotic bat based on the complex wing kinematics is presented. C...

Birds and bats frequently reconfigure their wing planform through a combination of flapping local sweep morphing, suggesting possible approach for improving the performance micro aerial vehicles. We explore effects combined morphing on aerodynamic by employing bio-inspired two-jointed with morphing. The consists inner outer sections, which flap around root joint (shoulder) midspan (wrist), resp...

Flapping wings enable flying animals and biomimetic robots to generate elevated aerodynamic forces. Measurements that demonstrate this capability are based on experiments with tethered robots and animals, and indirect force calculations based on measured kinematics or airflow during free flight. Remarkably, there exists no method to measure these forces directly during free flight. Such in vivo...