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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...

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Autores principales: Chen, Yufeng, Arase, Cathleen, Ren, Zhijian, Chirarattananon, Pakpong
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2022
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.
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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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