Miniature flapping flight systems hold great promise in matching the agility of their natural counterparts, bees, flies, and hummingbirds. Characterized by reciprocating wing motion, unsteady aerodynamics, and the ability to hover, insect-like flapping flight presents an interesting locomotion strategy capable of functioning at small size scales and is still a current focus of research. A vehic...

Three-dimensional unsteady computations of the flow past a fruit fly Drosophila under hovering and free flight conditions are computed. The kinematics of the wings and the body of the fruit fly are prescribed from experimental observations. The computed unsteady lift and thrust forces are validated with experimental results and are in excellent agreement. The unsteady aerodynamic origin of the ...

A three-dimensional simulation of hovering flapping wings was performed using an immersed boundary method. This was done to investigate the effects of chordwise wing deformation on three important unsteady aerodynamic mechanisms found in flapping flight, namely Leading Edge Vortex (LEV) shedding, wake capture and clap and fling. A wing was modeled as a flat plate, flapping close to a symmetry p...

Abstract Most insects and hummingbirds can generate lift during both upstroke downstroke with a nearly horizontal flapping stroke plane, perform precise hovering flight. Further, most birds utilize tails muscles in wings to actively control the flight performance, while their based on wing root along wing’s passive deformation. Based above principles of insects, Flapping Wing Micro Air Vehicles...

Pressure measurements over flapping wings are less commonly available due to the difficulties associated with instrumenting them. This represents an important limitation of the aerodynamic data available for the development of self-contained flapping wing vehicle autopilots and for researchers working on the aerodynamics of bio-inspired flapping wings. This paper describes the design, construct...

We present a new mechanism for passive wing morphing of flapping wings inspired by bat and bird wing morphology. The mechanism consists of an unactuated hand wing connected to the arm wing with a wrist joint. Flapping motion generates centrifugal accelerations in the hand wing, forcing it to unfold passively. Using a robotic model in hover, we made kinematic measurements of unfolding kinematics...

l We review here the results obtained during the past several years in a series of computational and experimental investigations aimed at understanding the origin of high-force production in the flapping wings of insects and the flapping and deforming fins of fish and the incorporation of that information into bioinspired vehicle designs. We summarize the results obtained on pectoral fin force ...

This paper deploys a recently proposed, biologically inspired, on-line, search-based optimization technique called Selective Evolutionary Generation Systems (SEGS) for control purposes; here, to evolve Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) flapping wing gaits in changing flight conditions to maintain hovering flight and track trajectories in unsteady airflow. The SEGS technique has several advantages, includ...