Development of a multiple parallel link rotor for flying robots

This paper presents development of a new multiple parallel link rotor for flying robots and its mechanism improvement. A key feature of the developed rotor is to have several sets of variable wings that not only change attack angles according to wing positions but also are located so as to have same degree phase difference each other. First, we construct a simulation model to obtain lift and drag forces by considering the trajectories of the swinging wings, i.e., by considering the change of the attack angles. The simulation model agrees well with experimental results. Though the simulation results show that our developed rotor with a battery can hover around 7 [Hz] rotational frequency, the maximum rotation in experiments is 4.67 [Hz] due to a mechanism structure problem. As a result of improving its mechanism, we can achieve 7 [Hz] rotational frequency in experiments. This result shows that the developed flying robot with the new rotors is capable of generating sufficient lift force for flying.