Ornithopter

For my Mechanical and Aerospace Systems class, we were instructed to design, build, test, and analyze a flapping-wing flier piece by piece. This project began by designing just the flapping mechanism, followed by a biflexible wing mechanism, and ending with a full chassis system that would permit sustained flight.

I worked with 2 other engineers to design three iterations of ornithopters with the goal being to minimize joints. We managed to use only four rotational linkages within our flapping mechanism.

Furthermore, while the project was simply to go through the paces of simulating and analyzing flapping systems, we managed to build an ornithopter theoretically capable of sustained flight, provided the opportunity to tune our system further.