Research on Fabrication and Flight Performance of Minitype Robotic Butterfly with Visual Recognition

Based on the aerodynamic principles of butterfly flight, the mechanical butterfly in small-scale is designed to investigate its biomimetic structure and flight performance in this paper. In order to achieve the collaboration mechanism among four wings, a novel flexible hinge is designed and developed. The robotic butterfly is manufactured with a maximum wingspan of 30 cm and a weight of 12 g, who can fly 5 m with a flight endurance of 3 min and a turning radius of 1.5 m. Equipped with a miniature monitoring camera, it could categorize the captured images during flight through picture processing and machine learning techniques based on support vector. This robotic butterfly is expected to be applied in tasks such as aerial monitoring, earthquake relief, and complex terrain surveying. ¹