Twisting morphing wings with tight geometric constraints for biomimetic swimming or flying robotic vehicles

Abstract

Active twisting morphing (ATM) wings have significant implications for biomimetic swimming or flying robotic vehicles. This article considers an ATM wing that has one shaft with many ribs, each rib is driven to swing in its individual plane that is perpendicular to the shaft, showing increasingly swing angles from the wing base to the wing-tip and thus form active wing twisting. For the overall twisting angle of the wing that is less than 90 degrees (e.g., during cruising operations of the robotic vehicles), we show that the geometry of mechanical implementations of the twisting wing can be further tightened using segment gears for transmission, instead of normal whole gears, which constraints have been largely unexplored. Here we provide the geometric constraints on the transmission with segment gears for such wing and give tighter feasible solutions of the constraints as well as provide the mechanical implementations using segment gears that are compact for ATM wings for biomimetic robotic vehicles.