Design and Development of Flapping Wing UAV

Abstract

Flapping wing air vehicles are unmanned miniature aircraft’s that draw inspiration from birds, bats and insects. They utilize continuous flapping wing motion to generate aerodynamic forces and moments. The fluid structure interaction analysis of biological and artificial flapping flyers is extremely complicated thus an efficient unsteady aerodynamic model is required in such time consuming problems as optimal flapping wing simulation. This project deals with designing a flapping wing air vehicle which includes applying inertial impulsive force to UAV in such a way that the flapping wing air vehicle reaches almost constant flight speed after removing the initial impulsive forces. The flow dynamics are different of the flapping wing air vehicles with that of the fixed wing UAV and this project deals with the utilization of the flapping wing in the UAV to overcome the challenges faced by a fixed wing UAV like maneuverability in remote areas, sound produced and identification during mission. Structural and aerodynamic characteristics of a bird in flight offer benefits over typical propeller or rotor driven unmanned air vehicle (UAV). Hence this study deals with the designing of an flapping wing UAV to overcome these drawbacks of fixed wing UAV.