Design and Optimization of a Mechanism for Out-of-Plane Insect Winglike Motion With Twist

Abstract

A mechanism is presented that can generate insect winglike motion. This motion includes both flapping out of the stroke plane in addition to twist of the wing. The mechanism has a single degree of freedom and employs a five-bar mechanism in addition to an auxiliary four-bar mechanism. The parameters in the mechanism were optimized to generate a prescribed motion of the wing taken from a hawk moth kinematic flight data. A scaled model of the mechanism was fabricated to verify practical feasibility of the design. In future, we will miniaturize this mechanism on our flying-bird prototypes.