Design and Fabrication of a Minimally Actuated Flapping Wing Hovering Robot

Abstract In this paper we report on the design and fabrication of a minimally actuated flapping wing hovering robot. In this robot, we use a minimum number of motors, two, each actuating one wing and utilize a four-bar linkage mechanism to transform a continuous unidirectional rotation of the motors to proper flapping motions on the wings. Therefore, due to this mechanism, the motors do not need to change directions to produce the reciprocal motion on the wings and hence reduces the consequent disturbances. Moreover, the energy consumption of the system reduces as negative work done by the motors are eliminated twice during each wingbeat. However, due to the effect of the four-bar linkage, the flapping angle range is restrained by the kinematics of the mechanism and therefore requires additional consideration in the design process. Here, we first present the kinematics formulation of the four-bar linkage for the motor-wing connection. Furthermore, we nondimensionalize the kinematic equations in order to be able to expand and generalize the results regardless of the dimension of the robot. After that, we analyze the nondimensionalized kinematics based on the size, resolution, and manufacturing constraints. At the end, we will present the manufacturing considerations and process for the mechanism, parts and joints of this robot.