As a follow up for my master’s thesis I made two new flapping robots which can be used in a water tunnel. “Birds under water?” you ask. Doesn’t make sense, does it?
Well, it does: in water you can go about fifteen times slower than in air while experiencing the same flow patterns. Flow visualisation is therefore much easier and will yield higher quality results.
So for the new flapping robots all the electronics and the motors are positioned above the water line: the wings are actuated remotely.
Further improvements are a stepper motor to do the flapping and a small servo to adjust the angle of attack — both give more control and increase precision of the flapping motion.
Debut on Dutch TV
During the first tests at the University of Groningen we had a TV team from Dutch station NPO doing a footage on formation flight, fish swimming and other biomechanics topics. So check out my robots in the Dutch TV show “De Kennis van Nu”:
Stay tuned for future news on the flapping robots and formation flight experiments!