Enhanced flight performance in non-uniformly flexible wings

Vincent, Lionel; Zheng, Min; Costello, John H.; Kanso, Eva

doi:10.1098/rsif.2020.0352

Cited by 13 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…Insect wings exhibit stiffness gradients from wing base to tip and leading to trailing edge [16]. The aerodynamic consequences of wing stiffness have been studied extensively, with nonuniform stiffness exhibiting a number of advantages, including significant improvements in the production of both lift and thrust forces in flapping wings and flutter-induced drag reduction [19, 34, 7, 35, 36]. Our results suggest that an additional function of this stiffness gradient may be to aid sensing performance, by directly improving accuracy and/or by allowing for more flexible placement of sensors on the wing.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nonuniform structural properties of wings confer sensing advantages

Weber

Babaei

Mamo

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Sensory feedback is essential to both animals and robotic systems for achieving coordinated, precise movements. Mechanosensory feedback, which provides information about body deformation and position in space, depends not only on the properties of sensors but also on the structure in which they are embedded. In insects, wing structure plays a particularly important role in flapping flight: in addition to generating aerodynamic forces, wings provide mechanosensory feedback necessary for guiding flight while undergoing dramatic deformations over the course of each wingbeat. However, the role that wing structure plays in determining mechanosensory information is relatively unexplored. Insect wings exhibit characteristic stiffness gradients, with greatest stiffness at the base and leading edge and lowest stiffness at the tip of the trailing edge. Additionally, wings are subject to both aerodynamic and structural damping. The sensory consequences of stiffness gradients and damping are unknown. Here we examine how both the nonuniform stiffness profile of a wing and its damping impacts sensory performance, using finite elements analysis combined with sensor placement optimization approaches. We show that wings with nonuniform stiffness exhibit several advantages over uniform stiffness wings, resulting in higher accuracy of rotation detection and lower sensitivity to the placement of sensors on the wing. Moreover, we show that higher damping generally improves the accuracy with which body rotations can be detected. These results contribute to our understanding of the evolution of the nonuniform stiffness patterns in insect wings, as well as suggest design principles for robotic systems.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Nonuniform structural properties of wings confer sensing advantages

Weber

Babaei

Mamo

et al. 2022

Preprint

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“…In recent decades, studies of such systems have drawn inspiration from the passive flight of plant seeds and leaves (Pesavento & Wang 2004;Wang, Birch & Dickinson 2004;Andersen, Pesavento & Wang 2005a,b;Fabre, Assemat & Magnaudet 2011;Huang et al 2013), fin and wing movements involved in animal locomotion (Paoletti & Mahadevan 2011;Wang, Goosen & van Keulen 2016) and related applications (Holmes, Letchford & Lin 2006;Kordi & Kopp 2009). Recent extensions have assessed the roles of flexibility and planform shape (Tam et al 2010;Varshney, Chang & Wang 2013;Tam 2015;Vincent et al 2020b;Vincent, Liu & Kanso 2020a). Collectively, such studies have led to advances in aero-or hydro-dynamic modelling in which the instantaneous fluid forces and torques on a structure are expressed mathematically in terms of its current kinematic state, e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Centre of mass location, flight modes, stability and dynamic modelling of gliders

Goodwill

Wang

et al. 2022

J. Fluid Mech.

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Falling paper flutters and tumbles through air, whereas a paper airplane glides smoothly if its leading edge is appropriately weighted. We investigate this transformation from ‘plain paper’ to ‘paper plane’ through experiments, aerodynamic modelling and free flight simulations of thin plates with differing centre of mass (CoM) locations. Periodic modes such as fluttering, tumbling and bounding give way to steady gliding and then downward diving as the CoM is increasingly displaced towards one edge. To explain these observations, we formulate a quasi-steady aerodynamic model whose force and torque coefficients are informed by experimental measurements. The dependencies on angle of attack reflect the transition from attached to separated flow and a dynamic centre of pressure, effects that prove critical to reproducing the observed motions of paper planes in air and plates in water. Because the model successfully accounts for unsteady and steady flight modes, it may be usefully applied to further problems involving actuated motions, feedback control and interactions with ambient flows.

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“…The effect of changing morphology or structure has also been addressed by investigating the transformation of falling paper into a paper glider by changing the location of the center of mass [22] and also by varying the span-wise flexibility of tumbling wings [23]. Simulation driven CFD analysis is an alternative approach which has enabled the exploration of a wider design space.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Robotic Automation and Unsupervised Cluster Assisted Modeling for Solving the Forward and Reverse Design Problem of Paper Airplanes

Obayashi

Junge

Ilić

et al. 2022

Preprint

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Although often regarded a childhood toy, the design of paper airplanes is subtly complex. The design space and mapping from geometry to distance flown is highly nonlinear and probabilistic where a single airplane design exhibits a multitude of trajectory forms and flight distances. This makes optimization and understanding of their behavior challenging for humans. By understanding the behavior of paper airplanes and predicting flight behavior, there is a potential to improve the design of aerial vehicles that operate at low Reynolds numbers. By developing a robotic system that can fabricate, test, analyze, and model the flight behavior in an unsupervised fashion, a wide design space can be reliably characterized. We find there are discrete behavioral groups that result in different trajectories: nose dive, glide, and recovery glide. Informed by this characterization we propose a method of using Gaussian mixture models to extract the clusters of the design space that map to these different behaviors. This allows us to solve both the forward and reverse design problem for paper airplanes, and also to perform efficient optimization of the geometry for a given target flight distance.

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Enhanced flight performance in non-uniformly flexible wings

Cited by 13 publications

References 43 publications

Nonuniform structural properties of wings confer sensing advantages

Nonuniform structural properties of wings confer sensing advantages

Centre of mass location, flight modes, stability and dynamic modelling of gliders

Robotic Automation and Unsupervised Cluster Assisted Modeling for Solving the Forward and Reverse Design Problem of Paper Airplanes

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