Periodic Tail Motion Linked to Wing Motion Affects the Longitudinal Stability of Ornithopter Flight

During slow level flight of a pigeon, a caudal muscle involved in tail movement, the levator caudae pars vertebralis, is activated at a particular phase with the pectoralis wing muscle. Inspired by mechanisms for the control of stability in flying animals, especially the role of the tail in avian flight, we investigated how periodic tail motion linked to motion of the wings affects the longitudinal stability of ornithopter flight. This was achieved by using an integrative ornithopter flight simulator that included aeroelastic behaviour of the flexible wings and tail. Trim flight trajectories of the simulated omithopter model were calculated by time integration of the nonlinear equations of a flexible multi-body dynamics coupled with a semi-empirical flapping-wing and tail aerodynamic models. The unique trim flight characteristics of ornithopter, Limit-Cycle Oscillation, were found under the sets of wingbeat frequency and tail elevation angle, and the appropriate phase angle of tail motion was determined by parameter studies minimizing the amplitude of the oscillations. The numerical simulation results show that tail actuation synchronized with wing motion suppresses the oscillation of body pitch angle over a wide range of wingbeat frequencies.

A Neural-network-based Approach to Study the Energy-optimal Hovering Wing Kinematics of a Bionic Hawkmoth Model

This paper presents the application of an artificial neural network to develop an approach to determine and study the energy-optimal wing kinematics of a hovering bionic hawkmoth model.A three-layered artificial neural network is used for the rapid prediction of the unsteady aerodynamic force acting on the wings and the required power.When this artificial network is integrated into genetic and simplex algorithms,the running time of the optimization process is reduced considerably.The validity of this new approach is confirmed in a comparison with a conventional method using an aerodynamic model based on an extended unsteady vortex-lattice method for a sinu soidal wing kinematics problem.When studying the obtained results,it is found that actual hawkmoths do not hover under an energy-optimal condition.Instead,by tilting the stroke plane and lowering the wing positions,they can compromise and expend some energy to enhance their maneuverability and the stability of their flight.