This project focuses on developing a flapping-wing hovering insect using 3D-printed wings and mechanical parts. The use of 3D printing technology has greatly expanded the possibilities for wing design, allowing wing shapes to replicate those of real insects or virtually any other shape. It has also reduced the time of a wing design cycle to a matter of minutes. An ornithopter with a mass of 3.8...

Flapping wing micro air vehicles have many possible applications and have therefore been the subject of extensive research. The Atalanta project aims to develop a fully autonomous, 10 cm wingspan, flapping wing sensor platform. The structure is based on a fully compliant resonating structure with passive wing pitching. Several design improvements have taken place since the last report. Introduc...

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) have drawn increasing attention recently, owing to advancements in related research, technology and applications. While having been deployed successfully in military scenarios for decades, civil use cases have lately been tackled by the robotics research community. This chapter overviews the core elements of this highly interdisciplinary field; the reader is guid...

2006). Flapping wing MAVs (FWMAVs) are a class of new conceptual MAVs that take design cues from flying insects in order to achieve a small size (<3–5 cm), high maneuverability and super remote ability (Yan et al. 2015). A FWMAV is expected to work in a variety of confined spaces such as urban canyons, caves, indoors, and jungles that large flying robots can’t be serviceable. To achieve such ta...

It is well-known that insects utilize vortices generated by flapping, by which they generate larger lift than that evaluated by the ordinary aerodynamic theory. However, the relative position between the vortices and the wing is affected by the motion of the center of gravity(CG). Such effect has not been well understood. To clarify the effect, we numerically analyzed a simple model considering...

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...

Following the identification and confirmation of the substructures of the leading-edge vortex (LEV) system on flapping wings, it is apparent that the actual LEV structures could be more complex than had been estimated in previous investigations. In this experimental study, we reveal for the first time the detailed three-dimensional (3-D) flow structures and evolution of the LEVs on a flapping w...