Towards Improved Hybrid Actuation Mechanisms for Flapping Wing Micro Air Vehicles: Analytical and Experimental Investigations

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.