We present our hovering Flapping-Wing Micro Air Vehicle (FW-MAV) named Temasek Laboratories FlowerFly (TL-FlowerFly) having four wings and double clap-and-fling mechanism driven by only one motor. The TL-FlowerFly with a wing span of 22 cm from wing tip-to-wing tip and weight of 16.6 grams is fully integrated radio control system for manually control of motor speed and pitch-, yaw-, and roll-control. Double wing clap-and-fling is created by four wings at both end of downstroke and upstroke. In this work, gearbox has been modified from the original design to make its flapping angle more close to the sinusoidal function in order to reduced inertia effect. The TL-FlowerFly can perform flight like a helicopter: vertical take-off and landing, forward and backward flight, left and right flight, rotation around its body axis, and hovering. Powered by an onboard single cell LiPo battery (70 mAh, 3.7 V), it can endure five minutes of flight without payload, and 1.5 minutes with a 4 grams payload. Force measurement for various cases of wing slack angles indicated that 5° slack angle wing is the best for maximum thrust production. Moreover, power measurement was also conducted to characterize the flapping performance of the TL-FlowerFly. Free flight tests of the TL-FlowerFly was performed to verify the hovering stability and control effectiveness.
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