Bioinspired Morphing Wing Drone

The purpose of this project is to create a flight system that is inspired by falcons in order to reduce vibrations in diving and landing. The motivation is to lessen mechanical fatigue while increasing diving speed through a bioinspired design. The subsystems involved with this robot that will be built include a set of morphing wings and tail.

I designed the wing prototype to be as light as possible. Weight reduction was achieved by making the design a skeleton structure and cutting out sections of the wing that were not serving a purpose. Once it was printed, I assembled the first redesign prototype and discussed with a team member on how it could be further improved. While the team took over the wing design, I moved on to experimentation. I experimented with different places and ways to launch the plane. Once the vibration sensors were mounted, we repeated this process to get vibration data.

The results of the one-tailed unpaired t-test suggest:

Vibrations: Double-joint = Single-joint > Zero-joint
There is no statistically significant difference between
variable-sweep wings, but both variable-sweep wings
have higher average vibrations than fixed wings.

Speed: Double-joint > Single-joint > Zero-joint
Double-joint wings achieve higher average velocities
than both single- and zero-joint wings.

With this bio-inspired approach, the glider opens new
avenues of research in unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)
designs, potentially offering improvements in flight stability,
fuel efficiency, and operational flexibility