Motivated by a winged seed, which takes advantage of a wing with high angles of attack and its associated leading-edge vortex to boost lift, we propose a powered 13.8-gram aerial robot with the maximum take-off weight of 310 mN (31.6 gram) or thrust-to-weight ratio of 2.3. The robot, consisting of two airfoils and two horizontally directed motor-driven propellers, revolves around its vertical axis to hover. To amplify the thrust production while retaining a minimal weight, we develop an optimization framework for the robot and airfoil geometries. The analysis integrates quasi-steady aerodynamic models for the airfoils and the propellers with the motor model. We fabricated the robots according to the optimized design. The prototypes are experimentally tested. The revolving-wing robot produces approximately 50% higher lift compared to conventional multirotor designs. Finally, an uncontrolled hovering flight is presented.
@article{arxiv.1907.08065,
title = {Design and Take-Off Flight of a Samara-Inspired Revolving-Wing Robot},
author = {Songnan Bai and Pakpong Chirarattananon},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.08065},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
Accepted for publication in 2019 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS)