Design of bionic active folding flapping wing vehicle

Abstract

Flapping wing vehicles mimic the wing flapping of flying creatures such as birds, bats and insects, and are characterized by simplicity, lightness, good concealment, high maneuverability and diversified flight attitudes. Currently, the development of wing-fluttering vehicles mainly focuses on wing-fluttering configurations, while there is little research on mimicking the large-scale active folding of wings of birds and bats. Here, we developed two types of large-scale folding wing vehicles with light mass and actively folded wings respectively, based on the property that the wings of flying organisms can be actively folded and contracted in a large scale, and tested their flight capabilities. The test results show that the latter vehicle, which combines the flapping wing mechanism and the active folding mechanism, has good flight performance and is able to accomplish the airborne folding of the wings on the basis of the flapping wing flight.