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Meeting	ACGS Committee Meeting 98 - Williamsburg - October 2006
Agenda Location	8 SUBCOMMITTEE D - DYNAMICS, COMPUTATIONS AND ANALYSIS 8.2 Development of "DelFly," Micro UAV
Title	Development of "DelFly," Micro UAV
Presenter	Prof. Bob Mulder
Affiliation	TU Delft University
Available Downloads*	presentation
	Downloads are available to members who are logged in and either Active* or attended this meeting.
Abstract	Delfly is an Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) design inspired by the amazing capabilities of insects to fly and maneuver. How insects manage to do this is largely unknown, however, at the very low Reynolds numbers they work with, flapping wings are mandatory as through flapping they create a dynamic leading edge vortex which, however, is quickly detached resulting in a loss of lift. By moving the wings in a figure of eight, they appear to be capable to recapture some of the beneficial effect of the shed vortex. The early version of Delfly was designed by a team of 11 BSc students which selected a configuration of four wings rotating about a single axis, each pair of two wings closing and opening while flapping. This configuration proved to work very well. An inverted V-tail with control surfaces was added for static stability and longitudinal and lateral directional control. The most recent version of Delfly features elastic tailoring of its wing spars to mimic to some extent the vortex recapturing mechanism of insect flight, a battery of 3.5 grams, data link of 0.38 grams, high resolution color camera of 1.2 grams and an efficient brushless motor of 1.5 grams, resulting in a total mass of 17 grams. Delfly is capable of high speed flight of up to 5 m/s as well as of hovering, its flying qualities turned out to be remarkably benign. Through its video data link with a ground station it will be able to fly autonomously and execute tasks as object detection and tracking. A ‘Delft Workspace for Artificial Vision’ was developed allowing easy editing and creation of vision algorithms as needed for these tasks.