A New Type of Flapping-Wing Robot Based on the Stephenson II Six-Bar Mechanism

This paper proposes a new type of flapping-wing robot based on the Stephenson II six-bar mechanism, which can reduce the vulnerability of large energy consumption, inconveniences, limited range of activities and so on in flapping-wing air vehicles. We use the biomimetic robot to simulate the flight and running patterns of a real bird, and then use the metamorphic mechanism to enable them to switch freely in two modes. For flapping-wing flight mechanism, we choose the joint planar crank rocker mechanism, which is very suitable for simulating the movement characteristics of the flying of a bird. As for the leg mechanism, the Stephenson II six-bar mechanism is selected as its structure and the optimization is based on the position and length of the crank mechanism on the motion characteristics of the robot. The presented method starts from the design of the structure, as well as modeling on work space, and finally to achievement on size synthesis. Then the simulation of the bionic legs shows that they have excellent stability. In the end, the physical model of the whole flapping-wing robot is tested and the results show that the robot can accurately switch between running and flying modes and its gait has a good bionic effect.