As one of the most important components of a flapping-wing micro air vehicle (FWMAV), the design of an energy-efficient flapping-wing has been a research interest recently. Research on insect flight from different perspectives has been carried out, mainly with regard to wing morphology, flapping kinematics, and unsteady aerodynamics. However, the link between the wing morphology and kinematics ...

Here we explain how flapping micro air vehicles (MAVs) can be designed at different scales, from bird to insect size. The common believe is that micro fixed wing airplanes and helicopters outperform MAVs at bird scale, but become inferior to flapping MAVs at the scale of insects as small as fruit flies. Here we present our experience with designing and building micro flapping air vehicles that ...

A lightweight flapping-wing micro air vehicle (MAV) was designed and built and successfully filed in the sky. The unsteady aerodynamics associated with this MAV was detailedly studied by using the method of computational fluid dynamics (CFD).The variations of different parameters of the flapping MAV, such as flapping amplitude, pitch amplitude and flapping frequency, were investigated with nume...

Recent developments in millimeter-scale fabrication processes have led to rapid progress towards creating airborne flapping wing robots based on Dipteran (two winged) insects. Previous work to regulate forces and torques generated by flapping wings has focused on controlling wing trajectory. An alternative approach uses underactuated mechanisms with tuned dynamics to passively regulate these fo...

Flexible flapping wings have garnered a large amount of attention within the micro aerial vehicle community: a critical component of computationalmicro aerial vehicle simulations is the representation of the structural dynamics behavior of the flapping-wing structure. This paper discusses the development of a new nonlinear finite element solver that is based on a corotational approach and suita...

Both kinematics and morphology are critical determinants of performance in flapping flight. However, the functional consequences of changes in these traits are not yet well understood. Traditional aerodynamic studies of planform wing shape have suggested that high-aspect-ratio wings generate more force per area and perform more efficiently than low-aspect-ratio wings, but these analyses may neg...

The design of a relatively new genre of aerial robots — a full-scale, bird-like flapping wing flying robot — is analyzed, modelled and validated through real experiments in this paper. Quaternions are used instead of Euler angles in the dynamical model to represent the flying robot orientation in 3D space in order to realize smoother rotational manoeuvres using spherical linear interpolation. E...

To design efficient flapping wing micro air vehicles (FWMAVs), a comprehensive sizing method based on theoretical and statistical analyses is proposed and experimentally verified. This method is composed of five steps including defining and analyzing the MAV mission, determining the flying modes, defining the wing shape and aspect ratio of the wing, applying the constraint analysis based on the...

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 ...

Creating insect-scale flapping flight at the 0.1 gram size has presented significant engineering challenges. A particular focus has been on creating miniature machines which generate similar wing stroke kinematics as flies or bees. Key challenges have been thorax mechanics, thorax dynamics, and obtaining high powerto-weight ratio actuators. Careful attention to mechanical design of the thorax a...