High lift force with 275 Hz wing beat in MFI

The Micromechanical Flying Insect (MFI) project aims to create a 25 mm (wingtip to wingtip) flapping wing micro air vehicle inspired by the aerodynamics of insect flight. A key challenge is generating appropriate wing trajectories. Previous work showed a lift of 506 mu N at 160 Hz using feedforward control. In this paper, refinements to the MFI design including those in [2] increased wing beat frequency to 275 Hz and lift to 1400 mu N using pure sinusoidal drive for a fixed benchtop experiment. We show through simplified aerodynamic models that not only do sinusoidal actuator drives produce close to maximal lift, but significantly improved wing trajectories due to non-sinusoidal actuator drives are practically unobtainable due to actuator limitations.