Design and Development of an Ornithopter (A Flying Bird)

An ornithopter is a flying bird inspired by Festo Bird has wings made up of polyester fabric and carbon fibre rod. BLDC motor and gears are mounted on Acrylic Fuselage with onboard Lithium Polymer Battery and Receiver to control it wirelessly. The weight of the ornithopter is 1020 grams and the wingspan is 1.5 meters having a flapping frequency of 4 Hz.

I worked on the design of the wings, selection of  fabrication materials and electronic control system of a bird. I also worked on the development test setup to evaluate force generated in the stationary position and in angular pendulum position. We fabricated this bird in the FabLab  COEP.  

Skills  Used Solidworks, Inkscape,Arduino, CFD ,Load Cell Calibration, BLDC motor control, Wireless Communication

Team Members : Mihir Mogra, Ninad Sayare, Gaurav Puppala, Bhushan Darekar

under the guidance of Dr S. S. Ohol 

* An accepted paper titled “Design, Development and Testing of an Ornithopter” in an Asian Conference on Mechanism and Machine Science (Asian MMS) 2018 will be held in IISC, Bangalore.