A Dragonfly-inspired Flapping Wing Robot Mimicking Force Vector Control Approach

Dragonflies show impressive flying skills by achieving both high efficiency and agility. They can perform distinctive flight maneuvers, such as flying backwards, which has proven to be achieved through "force vectoring" mechanism recently. In this paper, to explore the agile flight ability of dragonflies on man-made flapping wing systems, we designed, optimized and fabricated a dragonfly-inspired flapping wing robot (DFWR) with inclinable stroke plane control degrees. The proposed platform employs a four-wing configuration, each of which integrates an extra servo motor to enable the rotation of the flapping plane and imitate the "force vectoring" mechanism. Besides, referring to the flapping kinematics of dragonflies, the installation angle and wing pitch angle of the proposed DFWR are optimized considering the total lift and energy consumption through multiobjective optimization based on NSGA-II method. The "force vector" produced by the proposed platform has been illustrated through both theoretical method and experimental method. Moreover, the feasibility of the design is further verified through a series of operation validation experiments. Such a robot has the potential to provide a highly biomimetic platform to validate the flight mechanism studying of Odonata as well as the relative on-board applications such as bio-inspired vision.