Design, Fabrication, and Flight Test of Articulated

Ornithopter
Seongyoung Kim1∗, Myungkang Kim1†, Seungkeun Kim1‡and Jinyoung Suk1§
1
Department of Aerospace Engineering, Chungnam National University, Daejeon, 34134, Republic of Korea

A BSTRACT its long span length. Also, real birds generate positive aerody-
namics at downstroke and negative aerodynamics at upstroke.
In the upstroke, the wing is folded to reduce the resistance
Recently, research on flapping wing aircraft is
and reduce the aerodynamic drag. By reducing inertia mo-
on the rise due to the weight reduction of sen-
ment, the efficiency of flight can be increased.[5][6][7]
sors and actuators. However, studies on articu-
Smartbird, a complex articulated winging robot based on the
lated ornithopter have been lacking and commer-
shape of a gull, was developed by Festo in Germany in 2011.
cial articulated ornithopter is hard to find. In this
Smart bird is equipped with a servo on a wing tip to obtain a
paper, we design and fabricate an articulated or-
positive aerodynamic force by attaching a Hall sensor to the
nithopter with flapping frequency of 2-3Hz and
gear and using carbon plate and extruded polyurethane foam
span of 1.8m. The design based on kinematic
for weight saving. The specification of Smartbird is shown in
analysis is verified through Matlab and Solid-
Table 1.[8]
works, and Adams. The platform is made of car-
bon plate with EPP material skin. The design
parameters are compared and verified using a
motion capture camera. Additionally, this paper
shows thrust analysis with respect to wing shapes
sweptback and rectangular. Finally, the design
parameters are verified and analyzed through a
motion capture camera. Figure 1: Smartbird

1 I NTRODUCTION
The bird is an efficient and superior flying object with Span 2m
over 150 million years of evolution. Humans have longed to Weight 500g
fly in the sky watching these birds. Leonardo da Vinci (1452 Flapping Frequency 2-3Hz
1519) first made wing flap wings, and in 1924 the mechanism Flight speed 4.7m/s
for flapping wing aircraft was studied.[1] In 1930 Lippisch’s Table 1: Smartbird specification
early work was carried out and many attempts were made to
imitate the flight of birds in a technical approach.[2] In the
1980s, the energy benefits of airflow with winged wings were Inspired by Smartbird, a few universities have been work-
studied.[3] ing on a complex articulated winging robot. In 2016, the
Recently, due to the weight reduction of the mounted equip- Chinese graduate school of Harbin Institute of Technology
ment, interest in the winged flight robot is increasing. In conducted a composite articulated wing flapping kinematics
2015-2017, Chungnam national university, Korea, has car- study and analyzed it to make a flying body.[9] However, they
ried out on system identification, route point flight, etc. us- did not analyze the design parameter and mechanism of the
ing commercial winged robots of single articulated robots.[4] articulated winging robot using motion capture camera. In
However, since a single articulated robot has a short span 2014, King Abdullah University of science and technology
length, it requires a wing flap of 7 Hz or more in order to of Saudi Arabia conducted experiments on thrust and lift ac-
generate thrust and lift and is not suitable for energy saving cording to the wing shape. In this study, it was verified that
effect. the sweptback wing shape is larger in thrust and lift than
On the other hand, the composite articulated winged robot the straight wing shape. However, this is the result of the
can generate thrust and lift at the wing of 2-3 Hz because of UVLM simulation, which is not applied to the actual wing-
∗ Email
ing robot.[10]
address(es): [email protected]
† Email address(es): [email protected]
In this paper, Chapter 2 describes an articulated winging robot
‡ Email address(es): [email protected], corresponding author is designed and fabricated through kinematic analysis. chap-
§ Email address(es): [email protected] ter 3 analyzes the design parameters are verified and analyzed
 10th International Micro-Air Vehicles Conference
22nd-23rd November 2018. Melbourne, Australia.
through the motion capture camera. Chapter 4 analyzes the a lower-spar. The upper-spar generates flapping motion, and
thrust according to the wing shape and area with a single axis the lower-spar produces translational motion. This motion of
load cell. Chapter 5 analyzes the flight test results. the shoulder joint is transferred to the elbow joint.
An elbow joint causes folding of the outer wing.[12] In order
2 D ESIGN AND FABRICATION OF A RITICULATED
to generate thrust and lift positively, the wrist joint is in the
O RNITHOPTER
upstroke state and the airfoil of the outer wing is in the pitch
This paper, designs and fabricats a 1.8m - class articu- up state. In the downstroke, the airfoil of the outer wing is in
lated wing-like body with a flap frequency of 2-3Hz based the pitch down state.[5]
on kinematic equations. We verified it through Matlab and Considering this point, bearing is mounted on the wrist joint
Solidworks, a 3D modeling tool, and Adams, a multibody so that the twist angle of the wing is formed.
dynamics simulation. The robot frame was made of carbon In 2012, DGIST conducted research on flapping-wing model
plate, and the skin was made of EPP material.[9] for aerial robot. Through this study, the articulated winging
2.1 Drive Mechanism Design robot can obtain the ideal aerodynamic force when the length
The articulated wing mechanism used in this paper was ratio between the inner wing and the outer wing is 1:2.[13]
motivated by the Smartbird mechanism [8]. Therefore, the inner wing length was designed to be 30 cm
The power starts with a brushless motor and is transmitted to and the outer wing length to 60 cm.
the main gear via the reduction gear. In order to operate in
the frequency range of 2-3 Hz, the gear reduction ratio is de-
signed as 44, which reduces the load on the motor. Main gear
is connected to crank, coupler, and rocker (four-bar linkage)
which transmit power to upper-spar and lower-spar, respec-
tively.

Figure 3: Wing mechanism

2.3 Kinematic analysis

Figure 2: Drive mechanism

Main Gear Reduction Gear Motor Gear

Teeth 120 27 12
Module 0.6 0.6 0.6
Diameter (mm) 73.2 17.4 8.4
Width (mm) 5 8 5
Figure 4: A schematic of the inner flapping wing mechanism
Table 2: Gear information
In this paper, the name of the articulated flapping robot
designed and manufactured is USGull, and Figure 2 shows
2.2 Main wing Design the wing mechanism of the flapping of the USGull. Fig. 2,
The airfoil was modified in the same NACA7412 as the the mechanism of the USGull is a four-bar link with a Crank-
Smart bird. The wing mechanism of the articulated winged Rocker structure, named as follows. (L1 =Crank, L2 = Cou-
robot is similar to the human arm [11]. It is divided into pler, L3 = Rocker, L4 = Ground)
three parts : the shoulder joint, the elbow joint and the wrist The derivation of transmission angle and the inner flapping
joint. The shoulder joint is divided into an upper-spar and angle is as follows.

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22nd-23rd November 2018. Melbourne, Australia.
q 2.4 Simulation analysis
AC = L21 + L24 − 2L1 L4 cos(θ1 − θ4 ) (1) This paper verified the results by comparing the results
of MATLAB with those of ADAMS in terms of transmission
2
!
L22 + L23 − AC angle, inner flapping angle, folding angle. Input (Θ1 ) is
−1
γ = cos (2) excited, and the result is shown in Figure 6-9.
2L2 L3
 
−1 L1 sin(θ1 − θ4 ) − L2 sin(γ)
θ3 = 2tan
L1 cos(θ1 − θ4 ) + L3 − L4 − L2 cos(γ)
(3)
γ is the transmission angle and should be within the range
of 45◦ -135◦ because the four-bar link design needs satisfy the
design conditions[14]. The larger the flapping angle and the
span, the greater the thrust becomes.[15] In this paper, the
span length is 1.8m, Θ3 is the Inner flapping angle, the design
condition of this paper is set to L1 = 29mm, L2 = 65.2mm,
L3 = 63mm, L4 = 86.9mm. θ4 = 67◦ which is the input
value.

Figure 6: Crank vs Transmission algle

Figure 5: A schematic of mechanism in kinematics Figure 7: Crank vs Inner flapping angle

For the outer wing mechanism (as shown in Fig. 5), to

achieve the good performance, the quadrilateral mechanism
(BDFE) should be a parallelogram. Thus, the folding angle
of the inner and outer wing is writhen as eq.7
q
DE = L27 + L25 − 2L5 L7 cos(γ) (4)

2
!
−1 DE + L27 − L25
6 BED = cos (5)
2DEL7
2
!
−1 DE + L28 − L26
6 F ED = cos (6)
2DEL7
6
Figure 8: Crank vs Folding angle
F olding = 6 BED + 6 F ED + θ5 (7)
DE is a function of γ by Eq.(4) and γ is a function of AC
by Eq.(2) and AC is a function of the input value by Eq.(1). 2.5 USGull Prototype
In this paper, we set L5 = 25.5mm, L6 = 25.5mm, L7 = In order to meet weight and durability, the frame was
249mm, L8 = 249mm and θ5 = 71◦ . made with carbon plate, and EPP material was used as the

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 10th International Micro-Air Vehicles Conference
22nd-23rd November 2018. Melbourne, Australia.
skin. Figure 10 and Table 3 show the prototype and detailed
specifications of the USGull respectively.

Figure 11: Motion Capture Inner Wing Flapping Angle

Figure 9: USGull prototype

Weght 460g Mean chord 0.25m

Span 1.8m Aspact ratio 6.8
Length 0.9m Skin EPP
Gear ratio 1:44 Flapping Frequency 2-3Hz

Table 3: USGull specification

3 A NALYSIS WITH MOTION CAPTURE CAMERA

As shown in Fig.10, the experimental environment of the Figure 12: Motion Capture Folding Angle
motion capture camera was constructed and the kinematic de-
sign parameters were verified through this experiment.
optimal wing shape that can achieve maximum efficiency by
utilizing UVLM simulation.[16] The conclusion of the study
was that thrust was higher in the sweptback wing than in the
straight wing.
In this paper, the thrust due to the wing movement, rather than
the wind tunnel test environment, was carried out according
to the wing area and wing shape. For the experiment, a one-
axis load cell was used and the value of the change in thrust
according to the angle was measured. The experimental en-
vironment is shown in Fig.13.

Figure 10: Experiment Environment

Fig.11-12 show the results of the analysis using the mo-

tion capture camera. It can be confirmed that the design pa-
rameters are designed so as to be equal to each other when
compared with the kinematic equations and the ADAMS sim-
ulation obtained in Fig.7-8.
4 T HRUST TEST WITH L OAD BALANCE Figure 13: Experiment enviroment
Thrust is an important factor when an aircraft takes off.
This is true of birds flying. The research was conducted on the

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Fig.16 shows a straight wedge with the different area. The
area of 1.7m-scale is 0.1352m2 , and the area of 2m-scale is
0.1716m2 . The span length is 2m-scale longer than 1.7m-
scale and about 15cm longer.

Figure 14: Wing shape

4.1 Sweptback wing vs rectangular wing

As shown in Fig.14, the comparison was made between
straight and sweptback wings when the areas were the same
(0.1352m2 ).

Figure 17: Thrust result of different wing area

Fig.17 shows the results of the thrust test. As shown in the

graph of Fig.15, the maximum thrust is found at -15◦ . Also,
the larger the area, the greater the overall thrust. However, as
the wing area increases, the load on the elbow joint increases
and the flapping mechanism becomes unstable. Therefore, it
is necessary to adopt a double elbow joint to make a structural
complement.
5 P RELIMINARY F LIGHT T EST R ESULTS

Figure 15: Thrust result of different wing shape

Fig.15 shows the results of the thrust test. Overall, the

thrust shows a maximum at -15◦ . This is because the thrust
due to the wing is higher than the center of gravity. Also,
it was confirmed that when the pitch angle is negative with
respect to the pitch angle of 0◦ , the thrust of the sweptback
wing is increased by about 20% than the rectangular wing.
4.2 Comparison of rectangular wings with different wing
Figure 18: Flight Test
areas
We conducted a preliminary flight test and performed a
performance test on the USGull with 1.7-scale. It is believed
that maneuverability and stability are secured. However, due
to the periodical wing movement, there was a structural prob-
lem of the elbow joint and the flight performance was not as
good as desired.
6 C ONCLUSIONS AND F UTURE WORK
In this paper, an articulated ornithopter was designed and
Figure 16: Same shape with defferent area fabricated through kinematic modification and verification.

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22nd-23rd November 2018. Melbourne, Australia.
kinematic parameter design verification was performed using [9] Hongli Jiang, Chaoying Zhou, and Peng Xie. Design
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Development of a variable-wing mechanism based on
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Robot Research Center funded by Agency for Defense De- 2008, pages 168–173. IEEE, 2008.
velopment and Defense Acquisition Program Administration.
(UD130070ID) and the research project (10062327) funded [12] Nandu Jith PJ and Harsh Gupta. Design and fabrica-
by the Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy of Korea, Re- tion of a flapping wing unmanned aerial vehicle with
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Technology, 4(2):9–21, 2014.
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