A tailless butterfly-type ornithopter with low aspect ratio wings

This paper presents a tailless butterfly-type flapping wing aircraft, which is inspired from natural morpho insects. Based on the butterfly shape, the proposed butterfly-type flapping wing aircraft focuses on low aspect ratio. In order to reduce the weight, the aircraft carries out optimal design and determines the structure with thin membrane, ultra-high modulus carbon rods and custom connections. Through a large number of biological observation to mimic body movement and wing trajectory, this paper proposes a new kinematic model and analyzes its performance of prototype with computational fluid dynamics software. Flight test indicates that the proposed tailless butterfly-type flapping wing aircraft can realize one minutes cruising in specific condition.