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

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Abstract

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.

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Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported in part by the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2020YFB1313200), Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No.YWF-21-BJ-J-913), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. U1813221) and Academic Excellence Foundation of BUAA for PhD Students.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Robotics Institute, Beihang University, Beijing, 100191, China

    Wei Sun, Jingjun Yu & Yueri Cai

  2. Department of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, North China University of Technology, Beijing, 100144, China

    Guangping He

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  1. Wei Sun
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  2. Jingjun Yu
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  3. Guangping He
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  4. Yueri Cai
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Contributions

Wei Sun and Yueri Cai proposed the idea of this article; Wei Sun and Jingjun Yu conducted literature survey and drafted the manuscript; Guangping He critically revised the manuscript; Yueri Cai Advisor responsible for directing the research and the review.

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Correspondence to Yueri Cai.

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Sun, W., Yu, J., He, G. et al. Study on Transmission Mechanism and Flexible Flapping Wings of an Underactuated Flapping Wing Robot. J Intell Robot Syst 104, 19 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10846-021-01551-7

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