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The purpose of this paper is to provide a review of recent developments in Flapping-wing Micro Air Vehicles (FMAV) in Asia in past few years. The paper discusses recent Asian research in the development of FMAV and summarizes two major strands of research divided by insect-like FMAVs and bird-like FMAVs. Also the paper summarizes the developing status of FMAV and proposes the future research focus, development trends and application prospects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Inspired by novel mechanisms in insect and bird flights, in particular, the clap-and-fling mechanism associated with the aerodynamic force enhancement owing to the wing-wing interaction, we developed a prototype flapping micro air vehicle (fMAV), which is weighted 2.4 – 3.0 g, equipped with a X-type wing and a wingspan of 12 –15 cm. In this study, we carried out an integrated study of flexible wing aerodynamics and passive dynamic flight stability of the MAV by a combination of flexible wing kinematics and force measurements and computational approaches. We designed a high-speed camera filming system to measure the flexible wing kinematics and deformations and constructed the computational wing kinematic model. Together with the force measurements we investigated the wing stiffness effects on the force generation associated with the flexible wing deformation. We further used a biology-inspired, dynamic flight simulator to evaluate the aerodynamic performance of the flexible wing MAV. This simulator, by integrating the modeling of realistic wing-body morphology and realistic flapping-wing and body kinematics, provided an evaluation of the MAV's unsteady aerodynamics in terms of vortex and wake structures and their relationship with aerodynamic force generation. Our results show that the clap-and-fling mechanism is indeed realized by the prototype four-winged MAV and the flexible wing deformation even further enhance its effects. Furthermore, we employed a computational approach to analyze the passive dynamic flight stability of the MAV's forward flight. Results based on a linear theory indicated that the MAV is very likely of dynamical stability even with no active feedback control system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One of challenges in building insect-sized flapping MAVs (micro air vehicles) is to realize complex wing motions under severe design limitations in mass and size. In this paper, two examples of insect-sized flapping mechanism which reduces the mechanical complexity of the wings by utilizing flexible structures: One is a 1-DOF butterfly model and the other is a 2-DOF Diptera model. The butterfly model flew forward stably without any active control device. The flight speed depended on the wing flexibility determined by the wing venation pattern. It was found that the venation mimicking a real butterfly prevents excess feathering deformation of the wing, resulting in slow flight. In the 2-DOF Diptera model, wing pronation and supination were realized passively with a flexure film hinge at the wing root. Tethered flapping experiments showed that lift was maximized by optimizing the hinge stiffness. It was also demonstrated that corrugated cross sections of Dipteran wings are useful to increase spanwise stiffness of flexible artificial wings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper introduces a bio-inspired GAORI robot with renewable energy source and presents its command and data acquisition system for remote commanding as well as data forwarding/backup/relay. The hardware architecture design and software implementation of GAORI command and data acquisition system are presented in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]