Development of Tailless Flapping Wing System With 2.4 GHz Wireless Communication

Recently, there have been studies on characteristics of flapping motion of small birds and insects in flight where in that size category; flapping wing designs excel over their fixed wing counterparts. Despite that, complexities of wing motion and biomechanism of birds and insects added many difficulties to build an efficient flapping mechanism, especially that without tail configuration. In an attempt to overcome such difficulties, two motor-driven flapping wing system micro aerial vehicles (FW-MAV) were developed without tail configuration. First FW-MAV has one DC motor to drive its wing motion and optionally magnetic actuator for maneuverability. The second FW-MAV has two DC motors that can separately generate flapping wing motion. In addition, 2.4 GHz wireless communication was also implemented to both FW-MAV to remotely control the wing actuators. Then to evaluate their flight efficiency, flapping motion of the two FW-MAVs were evaluated based on kinematics simulation and flapping frequency test measurement. Further, thrusts produced by both FW-MAVs were also measured and compared. Based on the measurement, FW-MAV with two motors was about 4% heavier than the other FW-MAV, but it can generate about 10% larger flapping angle and about 3 times of thrust.