Abstract
A new strategy is proposed in order to effectively design the components of actuation mechanisms for flapping wing micro air vehicles. To this end, the merits and drawbacks of some existing types of conventional flapping actuation mechanisms are first discussed qualitatively. Second, the relationships between the design of flapping wing actuation mechanism and the entrance requirements including the upstroke and downstroke angles and flapping frequency are determined. The effects of the components of the actuation mechanism on the kinematic and kinetic parameters are investigated. It is shown that there are optimum values for different parameters in order to design an efficient mechanism. Considering the optimized features for an actuation mechanism, the design, analysis, and fabrication of a new hybrid actuation mechanism for FWMAV named “Thunder I” with fourteen components consisting of two six-bar mechanisms are performed. The results show that this designed hybrid actuation mechanism has high symmetrical flapping motion with hinged connections for all components. The proposed methodology for the modeling and fabrication of Thunder I’s actuation mechanism can be utilized as guidelines to design efficient FWMAVs actuation mechanisms.
Highlights
Flapping wings are usually designed in three classes: Micro Air Vehicle (MAV), Nano Air Vehicle (NAV), and Pico Air Vehicle (PAV) [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]
For flapping wings at MAV scale, several fabrication and actuation methods were applied and most of them are similar to the commercial FWMAVs, such as Delfly [10,12], Slowhawk2 [13], kinkade [14], and Kestrel [15]
We offer a hybrid actuation mechanism which has the advantages of other types of actuation mechanisms with avoiding their possible above discussed drawbacks
Summary
Flapping wings are usually designed in three classes: Micro Air Vehicle (MAV), Nano Air Vehicle (NAV), and Pico Air Vehicle (PAV) [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]. Considering the six-bar mechanisms, it usually uses a slider as prismatic joint in their structure [40] which is not desirable because of the frictional losses and difficulty in fabrication These types of the mechanisms are usually used in small flapping wings with hovering capabilities. Reported different types of flapping wing MAV designs and compare their salient characteristics They focused on mechanical aspects of actuation mechanisms for bioinspired miniature-sized flapping wing air vehicles with a weight of 10 to 100 g [43]. We offer a hybrid actuation mechanism which has the advantages of other types of actuation mechanisms with avoiding their possible above discussed drawbacks This mechanism is a combination of the alternate configuration and slider crank mechanism, but uses guidance bars instead of the slider systems.
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