Recent works have shown success in mimicking the flapping flight of bats on the robotic platform Bat Bot (B2). This robot has only five actuators but retains the ability to flap and fold-unfold its wings in flight. However, this bat-like robot has been unable to perform folding-unfolding of its wings within the period of a wingbeat cycle, about 100 ms. The DC motors operating the spindle mechan...

Most birds and many insects use periodic wing motion to propel themselves and maneuver. Most conventional flying machines are propelled by rotating machinery, achieve lift through rotating or fixed wings, and are controlled through the production of steady aerodynamic forces produced by rotors or movable wings. Many of the first powered flapping-wing micro air vehicles (MAVs) effectively replac...

After a short overview of the COLIBRI project, this paper considers cycle-averaged flight dynamics flapping-wing robot near hovering, taking advantage weak coupling between roll and pitch axes. The system is naturally unstable; it needs to be stabilized actively, which requires an attitude reconstruction. Due flapping wings, subject strong periodic noise at frequency its higher harmonics; resul...

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...

Birds have to flap their wings to generate the needed thrust force, which powers them through the air. But how exactly do flapping wings create such force, and at what amplitude and frequency should they operate? These questions have been asked by many researchers. It turns out that much of the secret is hidden in the wake left behind the flapping wing. Exemplified by the study of Andersen et a...

Flexible flapping wings have garnered a large amount of attention within the micro aerial vehicle (MAV) community: a critical component of MAV flight is the coupling of aerodynamics and structural dynamics. This paper presents a computational framework for simulating shell-like wing structures flapping in incompressible flow at low Reynolds numbers in both hover and forward flight. The framewor...

Insects are a prime source of inspiration towards the development of small-scale, engineered, flapping wing flight systems. To help interpret the possible energy transformation strategies observed in Diptera as inspiration for mechanical flapping flight systems, we revisit the perspective of the dipteran wing motor as a bistable click mechanism and take a new, and more flexible, outlook to the ...

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...