We present a new mechanism for passive wing morphing of flapping wings inspired by bat and bird wing morphology. The mechanism consists of an unactuated hand wing connected to the arm wing with a wrist joint. Flapping motion generates centrifugal accelerations in the hand wing, forcing it to unfold passively. Using a robotic model in hover, we made kinematic measurements of unfolding kinematics...

Avian flight has an outstanding performance than the manmade flapping wing MAVs. Considering that the feather is light and strong, a new type of the flapping wing was designed and made, whose skeleton is carbon fiber rods and covered by goose feathers as the skin. Its aerodynamics is tested by experiments and can be compared with conventional artificial flapping wings made of carbon fiber rods ...

This paper discusses a methodology of analyzing the flight dynamic stability of a flapping wing Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) in hover. The flexible flapping wings are modeled by a strain-based geometrically nonlinear beam formulation, coupled with an empirical aerodynamic formulation for load calculation on the wings surfaces. Wing flapping kinematics is described using a set of Euler angles. Nonlin...

Insects perform fast rotational manoeuvres during flight. While two insect orders use flapping halteres (specialized organs evolved from wings) to detect body dynamics, it is unknown how other insects detect rotational motions. Like halteres, insect wings experience gyroscopic forces when they are flapped and rotated and recent evidence suggests that wings might indeed mediate reflexes to body ...

The basis of this work was to understand the generation of lift and thrust of a flapping biwing ornithopter, which is influenced by its geometrical, dynamic, kinematic and aerodynamic features by following a generic approach in order to identify and mimic the mechanisms. As further development of earlier work, three-dimensional rigid thin wing is considered in flapping and pitching motion using...

The development of flapping-wing micro air vehicles (MAVs) demands a systematic exploration of the available design space to identify ways in which the unsteady mechanisms governing flapping-wing flight can best be utilized for producing optimal thrust or maneuverability. Mimicking the wing kinematics of biological flight requires examining the potential effects of wing morphology on flight per...

How to efficiently mimic the wing shape and kinematics pattern of an able hovering living flier is always a concern of researchers from the flapping wing micro aerial vehicles community. In this work, the separate or combined optimizations of wing geometry or/and wing kinematic parameters are systematically performed to minimize the energy of hovering flight, firstly on the basis of analyticall...

In this paper, the energetics of a flapping wing micro air vehicle is analyzed with the objective of design of flapping wing air vehicles. The salient features of this study are: (i) design of an energy storage mechanism in the air vehicle similar to an insect thorax which stores part of the kinetic energy of the wing as elastic potential energy in the thorax during a flapping cycle; (ii) inclu...

microrobot with a gas combustion mechanism and buoyant outriggers. These design components stabilized the microrobot, overcoming the water’s surface tension to allow take-off. A surfactant coating enabled diving, and a flapping-wing configuration provided functional propulsion for both air and water environments. The microrobot could land on an elastic surface, hover in air, submerge into water...

In this paper we carry out computational studies of three-dimensional flow over flapping wings. The problems we have investigated include, firstly, three-dimensonal simulation of flow over an extruded SD7003 airfoil in plunging motion at transitional Reynolds number and, secondly, flow over a pair of flapping rectangle wings with constant NACA0012 cross-sectional airfoil profile at low Reynolds...