The stroke-cam flapping mechanism presented in this paper closely mimics the wing motion of a hovering Rufous hummingbird. It is the only lightweight hummingbird-sized flapping mechanism which generates a harmonic wing stroke with both a high flapping frequency and a large stroke amplitude. Experiments on a lightweight prototype of this stroke-cam mechanism on a 50 mm-long wing demonstrate that...

With the advent of disruptive technologies, unmanned aerial vehicles have seen substantial growth over past few years. The market for flying robots is increasing drastically, and they are getting used in various sectors. This paper aimed at discussing novel design a hybrid fixed-wing type robot which both rotary-wing concepts combined so that stable flight with vertical takeoff can be possible....

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...

We present a novel approach for monitoring marine environments by a team of heterogeneous robots, comprising of a fixed-wing aerial vehicle, an autonomous airboat, and a legged underwater robot. The goal is to receive a region of interest from a remote human supervisor, and then using the coordinated effort of the robot team, produce a concise summary consisting of a small number of images, whi...

The goal of this project was to design the vision system onboard a PR2 robot tasked with navigating between floors in the ICICS X-Wing at UBC. The vision task includes the detection and localization of elevator buttons that must be pressed in order to ride the elevator to a desired floor. The system is implemented in ROS, the Robotic Operating System from Willow Garage, and executed on the PR2....

The goal of this investigation is to study the effect of wing sweep angle on the horizontal wing-body- tail configurations in subsonic flow. For this purpose, a series of wind tunnel tests were conducted on a model having a moveable horizontal tail and a wing planform with different sweep angles. Tests were performed at different tail deflection angles. Static surface pressure distribution over...

Today’s aerospace assembly is a huge manual task according to strictly controlled instructions, where different operators are responsible for different areas. This harmonizes with the overall lean approach, but the assembly is very time-consuming and some tasks are not ergonomically friendly, such as assembly tasks inside a wing box. Here, it could be possible to increase automation with the ai...

Maneuverability of flapping wing fliers inevitably goes with inherent system instability. Inherent instability means that systems require a flight controller and these vehicles are prone to crashing. This work proposes design feature stabilize the descent aerial vehicle. The vehicle is based on KUlibrie, nano robot under development at KU Leuven. A computational study indicates upwardly elevate...

Recently, flapping robots are noticed by many researchers, and many challenges are being made toward the realization of flight motions like insects, birds and so on. The purpose of this work is to develop flapping robots using a new type of piezoelectric material, that is, piezoelectric fiber composites. By using the composites, actuating fibers and sensing fibers can be embedded into a wing as...