Platform design and tethered flight of a motor-driven flapping-wing system

2015

Conference Paper

pi

In this work, we examine two design modifications to a tethered motor-driven flapping-wing system. Previously, we had demonstrated a simple mechanism utilizing a linear transmission for resonant operation and direct drive of the wing flapping angle for control. The initial two-wing system had a weight of 2.7 grams and a maximum lift-to-weight ratio of 1.4. While capable of vertical takeoff, in open-loop flight it demonstrated instability and pitch oscillations at the wing flapping frequency, leading to flight times of only a few wing strokes. Here the effect of vertical wing offset as well as an alternative multi-wing layout is investigated and experimentally tested with newly constructed prototypes. With only a change in vertical wing offset, stable open-loop flight of the two-wing flapping system is shown to be theoretically possible, but difficult to achieve with our current design and operating parameters. Both of the new two and four-wing systems, however, prove capable of flying to the end of the tether, with the four-wing system prototype eliminating disruptive wing beat oscillations.

@inproceedings{hines2015platform,
  title = {Platform design and tethered flight of a motor-driven flapping-wing system},
  author = {Hines, Lindsey and Colmenares, David and Sitti, Metin},
  booktitle = {Robotics and Automation (ICRA), 2015 IEEE International Conference on},
  pages = {5838--5845},
  organization = {IEEE},
  month = may,
  year = {2015},
  doi = {10.1109/ICRA.2015.7140016},
  month_numeric = {5}
}