Improved lift force of a resonant-driven flapping-wing micro aerial vehicle by suppressing wing–body and wing–wing vibration coupling

Abstract

We demonstrate the performance of a flapping-wing micro aerial vehicle focusing on the resonant vibration coupling effect. It was found that the average total lift force of our prototype robot, equipped with two resonant-driven piezoelectric flapping-wing actuators, was reduced by 35.8% compared to a rigidly fixed single actuator. In addition, large crosstalk was observed between the two actuators. We found that these phenomena were caused by wing–body and wing–wing coupling in the resonant system. To suppress the coupling effect, we proposed and tested an approach using paired-wing configuration; the actuator with this design is ideally a closed system with respect to resonant vibration, so the coupling should be reduced. The effectiveness of the approach was experimentally verified; the reduction rate of the lift force was improved to 10.6% and little crosstalk was observed. In addition, we successfully demonstrated takeoff by a three-paired-wing robot with a total mass of 1.12 g and applied a voltage amplitude of 150 V with an external power supply.