Design and Verification of a Large-Scaled Flapping-Wing Aircraft Named “Cloud Owl”

Abstract

The bionic flapping-wing aircraft has the advantages of high flexibility and strong concealment; however, in the existing flapping-wing aircraft, the platform performance is influenced by the payload capacity, endurance, and durability; additionally, the mission capability is constrained, making it challenging to put into use in real-world scenarios. In response to this issue, this article offers a thorough design approach for a large-span flapping-wing aircraft, focusing on effective flapping wings, effective flapping mechanism design, and enhancement of flapping mechanism reliability, and ultimately realizing the design and verification of a new bionic flapping-wing aircraft with a large wingspan, called “Cloud Owl”. It has a wingspan of 1.82 m and weighs 980 g. The aircraft is capable of autonomous flight and remote control, and it can carry a range of mission-specific equipment. More than 200 flights have been made by “Cloud Owl” so far in Xi’an, Beijing, Tianjin, Tibet, Ganzi, and other places. It has evolved into a flapping-wing aircraft platform with exceptional stability, payload capacity, and long endurance.

Review of the Flight Control Method of a Bird-like Flapping-Wing Air Vehicle

“…Internationally, some technology corporations and universities have conducted in-depth research on flappingwing air vehicles, producing physical prototypes that highly mimic birds in nature in form and function and have successfully achieved autonomous flight. The main ones are Nano Hummingbird [16] (Figure 1a) from the American AeroVironment Corporation, Robo Raven [17] (Figure 1b) from the University of Maryland, the bionic silver gull "SmartBird" (Figure 1c) and the bionic rainbird "BionicSwift" (Figure 1d) from the German Festo, "USTBird" by He Wei's team at the University of Science and Technology Beijing [18][19][20][21] (Figure 1e), the bionic phoenix "HIT-Hawk" and "HIT-Phoenix" (Figure 1f) [22] by Xu Wenfu's team at Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), "Sky Hawk" (Figure 1g) by Ang Haisong's team at the Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, "Big Two-jointed Bird" (Figure 1h) by the team of Beihang University, and the "Dove" [23] (Figure 1i) and "Cloudy Owl" [24] (Figure 1j) by the team of Song Bifeng from Northwestern Polytechnical University. Some of the most representative studies are the bionic rainbird "BionicSwift" from the German Festo and "Cloudy Owl" from Northwestern Polytechnical University.…”