Quadflapper

Summary

The Flapping Wing Micro Air Vehicle (FWMAV) project aims to enhance the performance of our existing Quadflappers, Alpha and Beta, transforming them into a single, robust contender against conventional propeller drones. The quadflapper is now on its gamma (third) iteration.

Some of the advantages of quadflappers versus quadcopters include:

• Safer, no high speed propellers which chop fingers off

• Longer flight time with same electronics

• Smaller acoustic footprint

• Powertrain and chassis can be made using basic DIY manufacturing tools like 3D printers and laser cutters

Another major goal of the new quadflapper was to make the assembly robust and easy to modify in Solidworks in order to research how various design changes such as clap angle, wing size, gear ratio .

To accomplish this, the quadflapper was designed for robustness and ease of assembly. In addition all components were modeled using global variables making it easy to make changes to the chassis, gears, and linkages.

The gamma quadflapper is still currently being researched for ways to improve thrust generation. Data is collected from load cells using LabVIEW, with multiple trials for each experiment. This data driven approach has improved gamma quadflappers thrust from ~50g to ~80g per subassembly.