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Aquatic unmanned aerial vehicles (AquaUAV): Bionic prototypes, key technologies, analysis methods, and potential solutions

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Abstract

Some research on aircraft is largely inspired by birds. Among them, aerial-aquatic amphibians with trans-media locomotion capabilities have greatly promoted the development of aquatic unmanned aerial vehicles (AquaUAV). In this article, the studies of AquaUAV are sorted out by their biological counterpart and summarized in chronological order from 2005 to 2021. To further understand the key technologies of AquaUAV, we focus on the structural compatibility design of wing and aerial-aquatic propulsion methods by analyzing their advantages and disadvantages. In addition, the analysis methods of kinematics and dynamics performance of AquaUAV for simulation and experiment are involved in the process of studying the kinematics, lift/drag, and propulsion of prototypes. Finally, we present several challenges and propose some potential solutions to improve the ability of AquaUAV in the future.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Electronic and Information Engineering, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing, 100044, China

    XinYang Wang & TaoGang Hou

  2. School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation, Beihang University, Beijing, 100083, China

    XinYang Wang, JiaWei Zhao, Xuan Pei, HaoHong Su & TianMiao Wang

  3. School of Biological Science and Medical Engineering, Beijing Advanced Innovation Centre for Biomedical Engineering, Key Laboratory for Biomechanics and Mechanobiology of Ministry of Education, Beihang University, Beijing, 100083, China

    XingBang Yang

Authors
  1. XinYang Wang
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  2. XingBang Yang
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  3. JiaWei Zhao
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  4. Xuan Pei
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  5. HaoHong Su
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  6. TianMiao Wang
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  7. TaoGang Hou
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to TaoGang Hou.

Additional information

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 62103035), Beijing Natural Science Foundation (Grant No. 3222016), China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2021M690337), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (Grant No. 2020JBM265), and the Beijing Laboratory for Urban Mass Transit (Grant No. 353203535).

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Wang, X., Yang, X., Zhao, J. et al. Aquatic unmanned aerial vehicles (AquaUAV): Bionic prototypes, key technologies, analysis methods, and potential solutions. Sci. China Technol. Sci. 66, 2308–2331 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11431-022-2142-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11431-022-2142-9

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