Study on Transmission Mechanism and Flexible Flapping Wings of an Underactuated Flapping Wing Robot

Mechanism design and lift force calculation of an underactuated flapping wing robot with flexible planar wings are investigated in this paper. A spatial four-bar mechanism is introduced to realize flapping movements of wings, and then the emphasis contents of the paper are focused on lift force calculation of the robot system. A simple approach is presented for quantitatively calculating lift and thrust forces of the underactuated flapping wing system. Several robot prototypes have been fabricated on the basis of the optimization results with regard to a set of specific parameters. Some flight experiments show that the presented transmission mechanism and the optimization approach are feasible.