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...

Flight Data Acquisition System for Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Flight investigations of aerodynamics and flight dynamics for micro-UAVs and mini-UAVs stimulate us to use automatic data acquisition systems to obtain valid estimations for UAV performances and characteristics. There exist many kinds of microprocessor-based and microcontroller-based data acquisition systems but all of them do not satisfy...

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,...

One useful propeller mathematical model for MAV

A model for Micro Air Vehicles (MAV) propeller performance evaluation is proposed and investigated. This model is derived on the basis of simple analytical relationships and is examined on a set of experimental data. It allows to predict the main propeller characteristics (for example, thrust coefficient, power coefficient, efficiency as...

Transient Analysis of Nylon 6/6 for a Thin Shell Structure by FEM

In the design of Micro Aerial Vehicles, decreasing the size is one of the most common challenging aims and to approach this aim, the weight of the whole aircraft shall decrease and structure is the second part which has the most weight [13]. In this paper, the use of a shell structure made from Nylon 6/6 is studied. Nylon was chosen because of...

An Architecture with Integrated Image Processing for Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles

This paper presents an overall MAV design with an integrated camera system. It shows the integration of the camera into the hardware and software architecture and how camera information can be used within the logical design for improving ?ight control. The presented architecture will be tested and evaluated during the International Micro Aerial...

Wing flexibility effects in clap-and-fling

The work explores the use of time-resolved tomographic PIV measurements to study a flapping-wing model, the related vortex generation mechanisms and the effect of wing flexibility on the clap-and-fling movement in particular. An experimental setup is designed and realized in a water tank by use of a single wing model and a mirror plate to...

An engineering development of a novel hexrotor vehicle for 3D applications

This paper is about the development of a novel type of non coplanar hex rotor with the ability to decouple translational and attitude dynamics. The proposed design features six variable pitch rotors arranged in three different rotor planes in order to point the thrust and torque vectors independently of body attitude. It is envisaged that this...

IMAV 2011 International Micro Air Vehicle Conference and Flight Competition Summer edition; proceedings

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...

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...

Practical Aspects of Trirotor MAV Development

This paper outlines the mechanical architecture, hardware components, and software structure for an unmanned micro aerial vehicle (MAV) trirotor. It focuses on the practical approach to the design and assembly of an aerial platform with three rotors. Furthermore, an embedded microcontroller-based navigation and control system is proposed to...

Aerodynamic analysis of the wing ?exibility and the clap-and-peel motion of the hovering DelFly II

In this paper, the influence of wing flexibility and the 'clap-and-peel' motion (one versus two wings) on the upward (lifting) force in hover is studied. CFD simulations based on the ALE Navier-Stokes equations together with radial basis function mesh interpolation are used. For the 'clap-and-peel' motion an immersed symmetry plane is introduced...

Wing flexibility effects in clap-and-fling

The work explores the use of time-resolved tomographic PIV measurements to study a flapping-wing model, the related vortex generation mechanisms and the effect of wing flexibility on the clap-and-fling movement in particular. An experimental setup is designed and realized in a water tank by use of a single wing model and a mirror plate to...

Numerical investigation of disc-wing MAV with propeller in a wing slot

Concept of dis?-wing MAV with propeller in a wing slot has a number of advantages and disadvantages. The concept is used by MIPTEAM for solving the problem of fixed wing MAV indoor flight by means of lift maximization for wing with low aspect ratio. There are only few investigations of dis?-wing MAV aerodynamics with propeller in a wing slot....

Insect-inspired wing actuation structures based on ring-type resonators

In this paper, we illustrate and study the opportunities of resonant ring type structures as wing actuation mechanisms for a flapping wing Micro Air Vehicle (MAV). Various design alternatives are presented and studied based on computational and physical models. Insects provide an excellent source of inspiration for the development of the wing...