MICRO AIR VEHICLE

Micro air-vehicle is a small flight vehicle that uses a lift-generating mechanism that is different from the mechanism used for large aircrafts. In micro air- vehicles, one of the methods for creating lift is a special flapping mechanism, which consists of translation and rotational motions of wings. This is adopted from one species of insect Encarsia Formosa. For this purpose, a 6-link mechanism is designed for three positions of wings by synthesis using kinematic inversion, and dynamic force analysis is done and the lift coefficient calculated is comparable with the lift of a well-designed airfoil. 

Micro Air Vehicle is a small flight vehicle that uses lift-generating mechanism different from the mechanism used for larger aircraft. These machines are used to perform a variety of mission including reconnaissance, surveillance, targeting, tagging etc in hazardous locations and for bio-chemical sensing in defense sector. The design features and the configurations of MAV's are different from that of normal aircrafts. The speed of MAV is very low and the size is less than 38.10 cm length, width or height. MAVs are not the small versions of ordinary aircrafts but are affordable fully functional, military capable, small flight vehicles in a class of their own. The mechanism for lift generation in these smaller vehicles is of different types like using rotary wings and using flapping wings. The mechanism used for the flapping wing is a six-link mechanism, which is designed from nature i.e. from the motion of the wings of a type of insect called Encarisa Formosa. The advantage of this special mechanism is that, it is having more lift compared to a fixed wing mechanism. Also it can increase the lift with out increasing the vehicle speed.

Since the proposed mechanism helps for lift generation and not for the full 3-d movement this model have not been used for more functions. The future work will be for designing for the forward motion and also for reducing the weight by using light materials.