Flapping Wing Vehicles: Numerical and Experimental Approach

Flapping wing vehicles (FWVs) has unique flight characteristics and the successful flight of such a vehicle depends upon efficient design of flapping mechanism while keeping the minimal weight of the structure. This book discusses design and kinematic analysis of various flapping wing mechanisms, measurement of flap angle/flapping frequency, computational fluid dynamic analysis of motion characteristics including manufacturing techniques. It also includes wind tunnel experiments, high speed photographical analysis of aerodynamic performance, soap film visualization of 3D down washing, studies on the effect of wing rotation and figure-8 motion characteristics and so forth.

• Covers all the aspects of a flapping-wing vehicles needed to design one and understand how/why it flies.
• Explains related engineering practice including fabrication, materials, and manufacturing.
• Includes CFD analysis of 3D wing profile.
• Discusses image-based control of group of Ornithopters.
• Explores indigenous PCB design for achieving altitude and attitude control.

This book is aimed at Researchers and Graduate students in Mechatronics, Materials, Aerodynamics, Robotics, Biomimetics, vehicle design, MAV/UAV.

Prof. Lung-Jieh Yang received Ph.D. from Institute of Applied Mechanics, National Taiwan University in 1997 and has one-year sabbatical leave to Caltech for learning MEMS technology during 2000-2001. He is now a full professor and the former department chair of Mechanical Engineering, Tamkang University, and is also the editor-in-chief of Journal of Applied Science and Engineering (an EI/Scopus/ESCI journal with ISSN 1560-6686). Prof. Yang devoted to the researches of polymer microelectromechanical systems (polymer MEMS, especially parylene and gelatin techniques) and flapping wing micro air vehicles (FWMAVs) for 20 years and has ever published 66 journal papers, more than 100 conference papers, 2 textbooks about MEMS, and 17 US/Taiwan patents about polymer MEMS and micro ornithopters. He has ever been the Taiwan side's PI of the Indo-Taiwan project Design, Development and Formation Control of Micro Ornithopters (102-2923-E-032-001-MY3) during 2013-2016. In this project he built up not only the technical cooperation between India and Taiwan but also coauthors several international journal papers with some Indian scholars/institutes. Prof. Yang hosted 2 international conferences including The International Conference on Biomimetic and Ornithopters (ICBAO-2015) and The International Conference on Intelligent Unmanned Systems (ICIUS-2017). He is also one of the vice presidents of International Society of Intelligent Unmanned Systems (ISIUS) since 2017.

Dr Esakki Balasubramanian received PhD in the field of Robotics and Control at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada. He has published two books, more than 100 Journals and Conference papers and 7 patents have been applied. He received grants from various Government of India funding programmes supported through DST, DRDO, ISRO, DBT. He has collaborated with Taiwan scientists under Indo-Taiwan schema (2013-16) for the development of micro aerial flapping wing vehicles and formation control through image processing techniques. He has designed a table top test rig integrated with two load cells to measure the aerodynamic forces of flapping wing vehicles funded by DRDO - AR & DB. He has also collaborated with Canadian scientists in developing and deployment of UAVs for railway bridge inspection. He developed amphibious UAV for collection of water samples in remote water bodies under Indo-Korea research schemes funded by DST, Govt. of India. His team developed UAVs for diverse applications including power line inspection, telecom tower inspection and radiation measurement, environmental monitoring, surveillance and traffic monitoring etc. His team won the first prize of Rs 5 lakhs in a National level competition organized by Power Grid Corporation Limited and prestigious telecom sector Aegis Graham bell award in the category of best innovative business model 2014. His research interests are UAVs, robotics, control and sensors with online data acquisition systems.