A Capacitive Hair-like MEMS Airflow Sensor for Flapping Wing Micro Air Vehicles

Airspeed information plays a crucial role in the takeoff, flight, and landing processes in animal flyers and aerial vehicles. Among the aerial vehicles, Flapping Wing Micro Air Vehicles (FWMAVs) represent the novel engineering approach of learning and mimicking animal flyers in the past two decades. A few prototypes of various sizes and...

Position controller for a flapping-wing drone using ultra wide band

The continuous improvement and miniaturisation of elements in drones have been essential for making flapping-wing drones a reality. This thesis presents an integral approach for accurate indoor position control and estimation on flapping-wing drones. The approach considers three main aspects to enhance transient response of the drone. The first...

Shape Optimization of a Flapping Wing for the Atalanta Project FWMAV

Flapping Wing Micro Air Vehicle (FWMAV) technologies are emerging due to the vast number of applications that they can be utilized in. Researchers and scientists are constantly seeking to push the boundaries to the extreme in terms of miniaturization of this technology, making it smaller, lighter and better performing. In order to achieve this...

System Identification of the Delfly Nimble: Modeling of the Lateral Body Dynamics

Flapping wing micro air vehicles (FWMAV's) are a subcategory of unmanned aerial vehicle which use flapping wings for thrust generation. The high agility and maneuverability of FWMAV's are very favorable attributes, making them more applicable in cluttered spaces. A tailless FWMAV called the Delfly Nimble has been developed at the Delft...

A miniature chemical actuator with a compliant expansion chamber, passive exhaust valve and electrowetting-based fuel injection

In recent years, an increasing amount of research projects contributed to the development of flapping-wing-micro-aerial-vehicles (FWMAV) that can fly and perform hovering flight in confined spaces. However, scaling laws have a negative influence on the aerodynamic efficiency and actuator efficiency. Consequently, FWMAVs suffer from very limited...

Flight control simulator using optic-flow Hardware-in-the-loop

The most simplistic acts in nature can be incredibly complex to replicate. Among which, insects in general, are profound micro-machines with evolution as the backbone for their most optimized features. This study focuses on developing an efficient sensing and processing strategy for autonomous flight maneuvers in Atalanta, a bio-inspired robotic...

Flight control and collision avoidance for quadcopter and flapping wing MAVs using only optical flow: Theory, Simulation and Experiment

Both quadcopter Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) and Flapping Wing MAVs (FWMAVs) are constrained in Size, Weight and Processing power (SWaP) in order to achieve flight tasks that include attitude and velocity stabilisation, as well as obstacle avoidance. <br/>Conventional sensory and control approaches, such as those relying on inertial, visual and...

Attitude control- and stabilisation moment generation of the DelFly using Wing Tension Modulation

Resonating structures with flapping wings: numerical modelling and validation

Tiny flying platforms with a wingspan of up to 20 centimetres are build to mimic flying insects: Flapping Wing Micro Air Vehicles (FWMAVs). Flying insects have the required size and also their flying capabilities are highly interesting. In order to maximize the energy efficiency of a FWMAV, the vehicle is usually driven in one of the resonance...

Simulation of optic flow based flight control for a flapping wing micro aerial vehicle

Bio-inspired flying micro drones, formally known as Flapping Wing Micro Aerial Vehicles (FWMAV) are a booming class of robots in today's world. Navigation and flight control of these drones is an interesting area of research that has become popular among roboticists and engineers due to its challenges. A bio-inspired optic flow based flight...

Structural Control Method Research motivated for MAV Lift Force Modification

Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) is a group of unmanned aerial vehicles that is autonomous and with a size restriction. Thanks to its possible application ranging from civil search-and-rescue missions to military surveillance missions, there is rising interest in the MAV related topics. From the previous work of the Atlanta Project, a vehicle is designed...