Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : [in Japanese]
Date : May 10, 2017 - May 13, 2017
Micro air Vehicle (MAV) is receiving wide attention because of its potential application for surveillances. In order to achieve robust flight and collect accurate information, it is of importance to stabilize the attitude of MAV. In nature, while animal flyers such as hummingbirds control the wing kinematics to achieve foraging on the wing, the mass distribution and the flexibility of the body are also important to achieve stable hovering. In this study, we designed a flexible body mechanism for hummingbird-inspired flapping wing MAV (fMAV) aiming at the passive stabilization of the body attitude. The effects of the mass distribution and the flexibility on the horizontal and pitching oscillations were investigated by simulating the oscillation of fMAV. It was found that the out-of-phase oscillation at the tail can cancel out the force due to flapping, and the mechanism can suppress the oscillation passively , with the appropriate mass distribution and flexibility.
