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...

Insect wings in flight typically deform under the combined aerodynamic force and wing inertia; whichever is dominant depends on the mass ratio defined as m = sh / fc , where sh is the surface density of the wing, f is the density of the air, and c is the characteristic length of the wing. To study the differences that the wing inertia makes in the aerodynamic performance of the deformable wing,...

Mechanisms of aerial righting in juvenile Chukar Partridge (Alectoris chukar) were studied from hatching through 14 days-post-hatching (dph). Asymmetric movements of the wings were used from 1–8 dph to effect progressively more successful righting behaviour via body roll. Following 8 dph, wing motions transitioned to bilaterally symmetric flapping that yielded aerial righting via nose-down pitc...

Mechanisms of aerial righting in juvenile chukar partridge (Alectoris chukar) were studied from hatching to 14 days-post-hatching (dph). Asymmetric movements of the wings were used from 1 to 8 dph to effect progressively more successful righting behaviour via body roll. Following 8 dph, wing motions transitioned to bilaterally symmetric flapping that yielded aerial righting via nose-down pitch,...

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...

Visually guided collision avoidance is of paramount importance in flight, for instance to allow escape from potential predators. Yet, little is known about the types of collision-avoidance behaviors that may be generated by flying animals in response to an impending visual threat. We studied the behavior of minimally restrained locusts flying in a wind tunnel as they were subjected to looming s...

The present work aimed to reveal morphological characteristics of worker honeybee (Apis mellifera) wings and demonstrate the function of resilin on camber changes during flapping flight. Detailed morphological investigation of the wings showed that different surface characteristics appear on the dorsal and ventral side of the honeybee wings and the linking structure connecting the forewing and ...

Abstract. This paper discusses the use of multibody dynamics, augmented by the direct implementation of nonlinear finite element beams and significantly shells, to perform the coupled structural and fluid-dynamics analysis of flapping wing Micro-Aerial Vehicles. The implementation of the shell formulation in a free general-purpose multibody solver is described and validated. The solver, coupled...

The paper deals with the dynamic modeling of bio-inspired robots with soft appendages as flying insect-like or swimming fish-like robots. In order to model such soft systems, we here propose to exploit the Mobile Multibody System framework introduced in [1], [2], [3]. In such a framework, the robot is considered as a tree-like structure of rigid bodies whose the joint evolution is governed by s...