Design and Optimization of a Pigeon-Inspired Flapping-Wing Robot

Flapping-wing robots have great potential for complex environments, such as military and civilian fields, due to the absence of propeller interference. Medium-sized flappingwing robots have excellent performance in human interaction compared to other sizes of robots, but lack maneuverability. Notably, birds that have mastered the challenging task of flapping are well suited to solving this problem. This paper presents the design process of a pigeon-inspired flapping-wing robot, PiRo. PiRo's isochronous growth formulas were extracted from natural birds and other parameters such as materials used were considered. Subsequently, we propose a bioinformatics based sizing method to guide structure optimization. The algorithm uses the pigeon wingbeat angle amplitude as the objective function and optimizes to obtain the rod length of the spatial crank-rocker mechanism. This results in a robotic wingbeat trajectory that is similar to that of a pigeon's (Columba livia). Finally, we tested the robot for outdoor maneuverability with customized avionics. The experimental results indicate that PiRo performs well in terms of stability and robustness, paving the way for safe deployment of the vehicle in applications around humans.