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Design, Characterization, and Liftoff of an Insect-Scale Soft Robotic Dragonfly Powered by Dielectric Elastomer Actuators
Dragonflies are agile and efficient flyers that use two pairs of wings for demonstrating exquisite aerial maneuvers. Compared to two-winged insects such as bees or flies, dragonflies leverage forewing and hindwing interactions for achieving higher efficiency and net lift. Here we develop the first a...
Autores principales: | , , , |
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Formato: | Online Artículo Texto |
Lenguaje: | English |
Publicado: |
MDPI
2022
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Materias: | |
Acceso en línea: | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9317235/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35888953 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/mi13071136 |
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author | Chen, Yufeng Arase, Cathleen Ren, Zhijian Chirarattananon, Pakpong |
author_facet | Chen, Yufeng Arase, Cathleen Ren, Zhijian Chirarattananon, Pakpong |
author_sort | Chen, Yufeng |
collection | PubMed |
description | Dragonflies are agile and efficient flyers that use two pairs of wings for demonstrating exquisite aerial maneuvers. Compared to two-winged insects such as bees or flies, dragonflies leverage forewing and hindwing interactions for achieving higher efficiency and net lift. Here we develop the first at-scale dragonfly-like robot and investigate the influence of flapping-wing kinematics on net lift force production. Our 317 mg robot is driven by two independent dielectric elastomer actuators that flap four wings at 350 Hz. We extract the robot flapping-wing kinematics using a high-speed camera, and further measure the robot lift forces at different operating frequencies, voltage amplitudes, and phases between the forewings and hindwings. Our robot achieves a maximum lift-to-weight ratio of 1.49, and its net lift force increases by 19% when the forewings and hindwings flap in-phase compared to out-of-phase flapping. These at-scale experiments demonstrate that forewing–hindwing interaction can significantly influence lift force production and aerodynamic efficiency of flapping-wing robots with passive wing pitch designs. Our results could further enable future experiments to achieve feedback-controlled flights. |
format | Online Article Text |
id | pubmed-9317235 |
institution | National Center for Biotechnology Information |
language | English |
publishDate | 2022 |
publisher | MDPI |
record_format | MEDLINE/PubMed |
spelling | pubmed-93172352022-07-27 Design, Characterization, and Liftoff of an Insect-Scale Soft Robotic Dragonfly Powered by Dielectric Elastomer Actuators Chen, Yufeng Arase, Cathleen Ren, Zhijian Chirarattananon, Pakpong Micromachines (Basel) Article Dragonflies are agile and efficient flyers that use two pairs of wings for demonstrating exquisite aerial maneuvers. Compared to two-winged insects such as bees or flies, dragonflies leverage forewing and hindwing interactions for achieving higher efficiency and net lift. Here we develop the first at-scale dragonfly-like robot and investigate the influence of flapping-wing kinematics on net lift force production. Our 317 mg robot is driven by two independent dielectric elastomer actuators that flap four wings at 350 Hz. We extract the robot flapping-wing kinematics using a high-speed camera, and further measure the robot lift forces at different operating frequencies, voltage amplitudes, and phases between the forewings and hindwings. Our robot achieves a maximum lift-to-weight ratio of 1.49, and its net lift force increases by 19% when the forewings and hindwings flap in-phase compared to out-of-phase flapping. These at-scale experiments demonstrate that forewing–hindwing interaction can significantly influence lift force production and aerodynamic efficiency of flapping-wing robots with passive wing pitch designs. Our results could further enable future experiments to achieve feedback-controlled flights. MDPI 2022-07-18 /pmc/articles/PMC9317235/ /pubmed/35888953 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/mi13071136 Text en © 2022 by the authors. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). |
spellingShingle | Article Chen, Yufeng Arase, Cathleen Ren, Zhijian Chirarattananon, Pakpong Design, Characterization, and Liftoff of an Insect-Scale Soft Robotic Dragonfly Powered by Dielectric Elastomer Actuators |
title | Design, Characterization, and Liftoff of an Insect-Scale Soft Robotic Dragonfly Powered by Dielectric Elastomer Actuators |
title_full | Design, Characterization, and Liftoff of an Insect-Scale Soft Robotic Dragonfly Powered by Dielectric Elastomer Actuators |
title_fullStr | Design, Characterization, and Liftoff of an Insect-Scale Soft Robotic Dragonfly Powered by Dielectric Elastomer Actuators |
title_full_unstemmed | Design, Characterization, and Liftoff of an Insect-Scale Soft Robotic Dragonfly Powered by Dielectric Elastomer Actuators |
title_short | Design, Characterization, and Liftoff of an Insect-Scale Soft Robotic Dragonfly Powered by Dielectric Elastomer Actuators |
title_sort | design, characterization, and liftoff of an insect-scale soft robotic dragonfly powered by dielectric elastomer actuators |
topic | Article |
url | https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9317235/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35888953 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/mi13071136 |
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