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Development of a Bird-like Flapping-wing Aerial Vehicle with Autonomous Take-off and Landing Capabilities

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Abstract

The lack of autonomous take-off and landing capabilities of bird-like flapping-wing aerial vehicles (BFAVs) seriously restricts their further development and application. Thus, combined with the current research results on the autonomous take-off and landing technology of unmanned aerial vehicles, four types of technologies are studied, including jumping take-off and landing technology, taxiing take-off and landing technology, gliding take-off and landing technology, and vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) technology. Based on the analytic hierarchy process (AHP)–comprehensive evaluation method, a fuzzy comprehensive evaluation model for the autonomous take-off and landing scheme of a BFAV is established, and four schemes are evaluated concretely. The results show that under the existing technical conditions, the hybrid layout VTOL scheme is the best. Furthermore, the detailed design and development of the prototype of a BFAV with a four-rotor hybrid layout are carried out, and the vehicle performance is tested. The results prove that through the four-rotor hybrid layout design, the BFAV has good autonomous take-off and landing abilities. The power consumption analysis shows that for a fixed-point reconnaissance mission, when the mission radius is less than 3.38 km, the VTOL type exhibits longer mission duration than the hand-launched type.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported in part by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2017YFB1300102), the Key R&D Program in Shaanxi Province of China (No. 2020ZDLGY06-05, No 2021ZDLGY09-10), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 11902103, No. 11872314).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Aeronautics, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi’an, 710072, China

    Dongfu Ma, Bifeng Song, Zhihe Wang, Jianlin Xuan & Dong Xue

  2. Yangtze River Delta Research Institute of Northwestern Polytechnical University, Taicang, 215400, China

    Dongfu Ma & Jianlin Xuan

  3. Research & Development Institute of Northwestern Polytechnical University in Shenzhen, Shenzhen, 518057, China

    Zhihe Wang & Dong Xue

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  1. Dongfu Ma
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  2. Bifeng Song
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  4. Jianlin Xuan
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Correspondence to Jianlin Xuan.

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Ma, D., Song, B., Wang, Z. et al. Development of a Bird-like Flapping-wing Aerial Vehicle with Autonomous Take-off and Landing Capabilities. J Bionic Eng 18, 1291–1303 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42235-021-00085-w

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42235-021-00085-w

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