George Vachtsevanos

High endurance, micro aerial surveillance and reconnaisance robot

Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have gained a significant amount of research lately, with a number of universities and industry sponsors paving the way with micro flying robots to perform Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) Missions. However, much of the work done in flapping wing MAVs till date has not shown performance improvements over their VTOL, rotary-wing counterparts. Research and development over the years has shown that insects and birds have unmatched flying capabilities in the Low Reynolds Number Regime. Their phenomenal flight performance is attributed to among others the highly energy efficient actuation systems & their power to weight ratios, efficient aerodynamics & wing configurations, novel & high-speed flight-control and processing. The paper proposes and illustrates the developments thus far towards the design of a novel, high endurance, flapping wing micro aerial robot for surveillance and reconnaissance. The entire design and development efforts, including aerodynamics, actuation-mechanisms, flight controls, embedded controls & processing and finally flight testing is abridged and presented herein.