Design and Take-Off Flight of a Samara-Inspired Revolving-Wing Robot
This work addresses the challenge of improving lift efficiency for small-scale aerial robots, which is incremental as it builds on existing bio-inspired designs.
The researchers tackled the problem of designing a lightweight aerial robot inspired by samara seeds to achieve efficient hovering flight, resulting in a 13.8-gram robot that produces approximately 50% higher lift compared to conventional multirotor designs.
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.