| The UC Berkeley Micromechanical Flying Insect project entails the development of a micro air vehicle a little larger than a typical housefly which is capable of autonomous flight using flapping wings. There are numerous commercial and military applications which have been identified for such a flying microrobot. A functional, rather than morphological, biomimetic approach to mechanical design is taken so that the kinematic and dynamic wing motions of the robot will have the same qualitative aspects as those of a biological flying insect. Different manufacturing tools have been developed and employed to fabricate this robot and rapid prototyping techniques have allowed swift evolution of thorax models. Among these techniques, laser micromachining of templates and micro-origami to assemble these templates have been crucial to the thorax fabrication. Actuation is provided by single-crystal piezoelectric unimorphs with motion amplified through planar four-bar linkages. Work is also presented on the mechanical design of the flexures, thorax, and airframe. The first three-dimensional force map has been generated from a beating wing thorax at final scale and the data and compared to simulated forces. The results point out some important issues with regard to the actuator driving signals. |
