Development of flapping robots using piezoelectric fiber composites — Improvement of flapping mechanism inspired from insects with indirect flight muscle

Recently, many challenges are being made toward the realization of flight motions like insects, birds and so on. The purpose of this work is to develop flapping robots using a new type of piezoelectric material, that is, piezoelectric fiber composites. By using the composites, actuating as well as energy-harvesting fibers and sensing fibers can be embedded in the structure and it makes flapping robots with compact and light structure. This paper proposes a new flapping mechanism for the flapping robots using piezoelectric fiber composites to improve the performance of the robot developed in our previous work, which is inspired from insects with indirect flight muscle. A prototype of flapping robot using the new flapping mechanism has been made and experimental results show the improvement of the performance.