A novel measurement setup to measure the fast harmonic motion and the power consumption of a hummingbird sized flapping wing driven by a resonant flapping mechanism

摘要

This paper presents the measurement set-up used to measure the wing motion of a robotic hummingbird-sized flapping wing and the power needed to drive this wing using a resonant flapping mechanism. The paper shows that a magnetic encoder can be used to instantaneously measure the fast back and forth stroke motion of a small flapping wing without affecting the wing motion and that the sensor data can be used in a feedback loop to control the stroke amplitude. The power consumption of the resonant flapping mechanism is at least 40% lower than the power consumption of the Nano Hummingbird of Aerovironment, which is considered to be the state of art in hummingbird-like flapping wing nano air vehicles.