Design of a 1:1 Scale Penguin-Like Robot with Effective Flexible Wings

Abstract

Penguins are excellent swimmers benefiting from their streamlined body and agile wings. In order to realize such swimming abilities, a penguin-like robot at 1:1 scale was designed, mainly consisting of a streamlined body shell referring to the structure and size of real penguins, a pair of active wings, and a wing driving mechanism that can achieve flapping, feathering and pitch of the wings with a total of five degrees of freedom. The kinematic characteristics of the wings conforms to the anatomical conclusion. In addition, the bending deformation was measured over a dead wing specimen, and the flexural stiffness was calculated. Based on the results, a two-joint flexible wing was fabricated, which can undergo passive deformation during flapping. The performance of the fabricated wing is verified by water tunnel test. The results show that the flexible wing can achieve larger thrust forces and sideway forces, which indicate potential agile motion of the penguin-mimetic robot.