The flapping wing micro air vehicle (FWMAV) has been attracting lots of interest since the 1990s and is one research hotspots in microminiaturization design. However, along with miniaturization FWMAV development, flight endurance becomes bottleneck that significantly impedes rapid development for these aircrafts because critical limit energy supply due to limited overall size weight. In this pa...

Nonlinear aeroelasticity of a flapping wing Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) is analyzed in this paper. The geometrically nonlinear deformations are modeled by a nonlinear strain-based beam formulation, coupled with six rigid-body degrees of freedom of the aircraft. Wing flapping kinematics is described using a set of Euler angles. Two types of unsteady aerodynamic formulations are incorporated for load...

Flapping wing Micro Aerial Vehicles (FMAVs) have recently emerged as a promising challenge lying on the progress of the avionics technologies. The present paper deals with the development of simple control laws for an embedded implementation on a biomimetic MAV, aiming to control its attitude and position. The control laws are bounded, taking into consideration the amplitude bounds of the contr...

Three-dimensional numerical simulations are used to investigate the hydrodynamic performance and the wake patterns of a sunfish in steady swimming. Immersed boundary method for deformable attaching bodies (IBM-DAB) are used to handle complex moving boundaries of one solid body (fish body) attached with several membranes (fins). The effects of the vortices shed from both the dorsal and anal fins...

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...

owe much of their extraordinary evolutionary success to flight. Compared with their flightless ancestors, flying insects are better equipped to evade predators, search food sources and colonize new habitats. Because their survival and evolution depend so crucially on flight performance, it is hardly surprising that the flight-related sensory, physiological, behavioral and biomechanical traits o...