This paper presents an overview of the on-going research activities at Shrivenham, aimed at the design of an autonomous flapping-wing micro air vehicle. After introducing the problem of insect wing kinematics and aerodynamics, we describe our quasi-three-dimensional aerodynamic model for flapping wings. This is followed by a brief discussion of some aerodynamic issues relating to the lift-gener...

The purpose of this paper is to analyze and discuss the performance and stability of a tailless micro aerial vehicle with flexible articulated wings. The dihedral angles can be varied symmetrically on bothwings to control the aircraft speed independently of the angle of attack and flight-path angle, while an asymmetric dihedral setting can be used to control yaw in the absence of a vertical tai...

Insect wings are deformable structures that change shape passively and dynamically owing to inertial and aerodynamic forces during flight. It is still unclear how the three-dimensional and passive change of wing kinematics owing to inherent wing flexibility contributes to unsteady aerodynamics and energetics in insect flapping flight. Here, we perform a systematic fluid-structure interaction ba...

Flow visualisations are essential to better understand the unsteady aerodynamics of flapping wing flight. The issues inherent to animal experiments, such as poor controllability and unnatural flapping when tethered, can be avoided by using robotic flyers. Such an approach holds a promise for a more systematic and repeatable methodology for flow visualisation, through a better controlled flight....

Recent work on the aerodynamics of flapping flight reveals fundamental differences in the mechanisms of aerodynamic force generation between fixed and flapping wings. When fixed wings translate at high angles of attack, they periodically generate and shed leading and trailing edge vortices as reflected in their fluctuating aerodynamic force traces and associated flow visualization. In contrast,...

This paper describes recent research on flapping-wing micro air vehicles, based on insect-like aerodynamics. A combined analytical, experimental and CFD approach is being adopted to understand and design suitable wing aerodynamics and kinematics. The CFD has used the Fluent 6 commercial code together with the grid-generating software Gambit 2; the experiments have been conducted in air and wate...

Wing flapping is one of the most widespread propulsion methods found in nature; however, the current understanding of the aerodynamics in bird wakes is incomplete. The role of the unsteady motion in the flow and its contribution to the aerodynamics is still an open question. In the current study, the wake of a freely flying European starling has been investigated using long-duration high-speed ...

This paper describes the development and application of a rapid prototyping system for flight testing of autonomous flight algorithms for unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) at the Naval Postgraduate School. The system provides a small team with the ability to rapidly prototype new theoretical concepts and flight-test their performance in realistic mission scenarios. The original development was done ...

A three-dimensional high-order unstructured dynamic grid based spectral difference (SD) Navier-Stokes (N-S) compressible flow solver with low Mach number preconditioning is used to investigate the effects of wing planforms on the aerodynamics performance of the thin finite-span flapping wings in this paper. Two types of wings, namely the rectangular and bio-inspired wings, are simulated and com...

The jellyfish-like flying machine is a new development direction of the future bionic flapping-wing aircraft besides insect-mimic and bird-mimic micro air vehicles (MAVs). To better understand underlying fluid mechanisms flyer, we numerically simulated aerodynamic forces three-dimensional flapping wings under different control parameters. effects amplitude, vortex wake, up-flight speed, wing–wi...