Efficient resonant drive of flapping-wing robots

Authors:
Stanley S. Baek;Kevin Y. Ma;Ronald S. Fearing
Affiliations:
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, CA;Department of Mechanical Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, CA;Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, University of California, Berkeley, CA
Venue:
IROS'09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE/RSJ international conference on Intelligent robots and systems
Year:
2009

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Abstract

Flapping-wing air vehicles can improve efficiency by running at resonance to reduce inertial costs of accelerating and decelerating the wings. For battery-powered, DC motor-driven systems with gears and cranks, the drive torque and velocity is a complicated function of battery voltage. Hence, resonant behavior is not as well defined as for flapping-wing systems with elastic actuators. In this paper, we analyze a resonant drive to reduce average battery power consumption for DC motor-driven flapping-wing robots. We derive a nondimensionalized analysis of the generic class of a motor-driven slider crank, considering motor and battery resistance. This analysis is used to demonstrate the benefits of efficient resonant drive on a 5.8g flapping-wing robot and experiments showed a 30% average power reduction by integrating a tuned compliant element.