Insect-Inspired Flapping-Wing Robots: Design, Analysis, and Flight

This book provides the whole design process and details of a two-winged tailless flapping-wing robot. It shares experience in bioinspiration related to the development of the KUBeetle. It overviews research related to flapping wings, related aerodynamics, and design and fabrication of the KUBeetle, including considerations for selecting a driving motor and predicting flapping frequency. It explains prediction of aerodynamic forces using the unsteady blade element theory (UBET) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with the commercial software ANSYS Fluent.

Features:

• Describes the latest breakthrough and technology in the design, fabrication, and control of the insect-like flapping-wing robots
• Addresses the challenges in this field, such as power efficiency and flight stability, and provides a roadmap for future research
• Showcases the potential applications of these robots
• Describes unsteady blade element theory as a simpler method for aerodynamic force estimation compared to the CFD
• Details two different designs of control moment generators that are essential for attitude control

This book is aimed at graduate students and researchers in robotics, aerospace, and mechanical engineering.