HiFly-Dragon: A Dragonfly Inspired Flapping Flying Robot with Modified, Resonant, Direct-Driven Flapping Mechanisms

Abstract

This paper describes a dragonfly-inspired Flapping Wing Micro Air Vehicle (FW-MAV), named HiFly-Dragon. Dragonflies exhibit exceptional flight performance in nature, surpassing most of the other insects, and benefit from their abilities to independently move each of their four wings, including adjusting the flapping amplitude and the flapping amplitude offset. However, designing and fabricating a flapping robot with multi-degree-of-freedom (multi-DOF) flapping driving mechanisms under stringent size, weight, and power (SWaP) constraints poses a significant challenge. In this work, we propose a compact microrobot dragonfly with four tandem independently controllable wings, which is directly driven by four modified resonant flapping mechanisms integrated on the Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs) of the avionics. The proposed resonant flapping mechanism was tested to be able to enduringly generate 10 gf lift at a frequency of 28 Hz and an amplitude of 180° for a single wing with an external DC power supply, demonstrating the effectiveness of the resonance and durability improvement. All of the mechanical parts were integrated on two PCBs, and the robot demonstrates a substantial weight reduction. The latest prototype has a wingspan of 180 mm, a total mass of 32.97 g, and a total lift of 34 gf. The prototype achieved lifting off on a balance beam, demonstrating that the directly driven robot dragonfly is capable of overcoming self-gravity with onboard batteries.