Dynamic Behaviors of a Vortex Ring on a Butterfly and a Small Flapping Robot

Butterflies fly combining wing flapping and gliding efficiently and have beautiful flight patterns. Micro-Air-Vehicles (MAVs) and micro-flight robots that mimic the flight mechanisms of insects have been attracting significant attention in recent years. A number of MAVs and micro-flight robots that use various devices have been reported. However...

PLASE: A Novel Planar Surface Extraction Method for the Autonomous Navigation of Micro-Air Vehicle

A planar surface extraction method is proposed for the indoor navigation of a micro-air vehicle (MAV). The algorithm finds planar clusters from the unorganized pointclouds. This is achieved by implementing a novel approach that first segments the data points into clusters and then each cluster is estimated for its planarity. The method is tested...

Aerodynamics Study of Fixed-Wing MAV: Wind Tunnel and Flight Test

Obtaining accurate aerodynamic characteristics of in-flight Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) was viewed as difficult, due to the nature of very low Reynolds number, 3D complex flow, and strong influence from propulsion slipstream. This paper presents the study of the tailless, fixed-wing MAV, KuMAV-001, performed at Kasetsart University. The team...

Closing the gap between simulation and reality in the sensor and motion models of an autonomous AR.Drone

This article describes a method to develop an advanced navigation capability for the standard platform of the IMAV indoor competition: the Parrot AR.Drone. Our development is partlybased on simulation, which requires both a re-alistic sensor and motion model. This article de-scribes how a visual map of the indoor environ-ment can be made,...

Inverse Dynamics Approach to Adaptive Damage-Tolerant Control for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

A control problem is discussed for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) as applies to its short-period longitudinal motion. The problem is formulated taking into account various uncertainty factors such as imperfect knowledge about UAV parameters and characteristics as well as environment exposure. One more class of the uncertainty factors includes...

Application of Electro-Active Materials to a Coaxial-Rotor NAV

A new Nano Air Vehicle (NAV) configuration based on a coaxial nano rotor has been studied by ISAE. The coaxial rotor provides the thrust necessary for hovering and low speed translation flight. The major design challenge for rotary-wing NAVs is related to the difficulty of miniaturizing complex mechanisms such as a rotor cyclic pitch swashplate...

Equilibrium Transition Study for a Hybrid MAV

Wind tunnel testing was performed on a VTOL aircraft in order to characterize longitudinal flight behavior during a transition between vertical and horizontal flight modes. Trim values for airspeed, pitch, motor speed and elevator position were determined. Data was collected by independently varying the trim parameters, and stability and control...

Analysis of tail effects in flapping flight

Numerical simulations have been performed to examine the interference effects between an upstream flapping airfoil and a downstream stationary airfoil in a tandem configuration at a Reynolds number of 1000, which is around the regime of small flapping micro aerial vehicles. The objective is to investigate the effect of the distance of the tail...

Analysis of tail effects in flapping flight

Numerical simulations have been performed to examine the interference effects between an upstream flapping airfoil and a downstream stationary airfoil in a tandem configuration at a Reynolds number of 1000, which is around the regime of small flapping micro aerial vehicles. The objective is to investigate the effect of the distance of the tail...