Development of Minimal Biorobotic Stealth Distance and Its Application in the Design of Direct-Drive Dragonfly-Inspired Aircraft

TL;DR

This paper introduces the MBSD metric to evaluate bionic resemblance in dragonfly-inspired aircraft, aiding design optimization and demonstrating its effectiveness through modeling and analysis.

Contribution

The paper develops the MBSD as a new quantitative metric for biorobotic aircraft design and integrates it into the design process of dragonfly-inspired aircraft.

Findings

MBSD effectively evaluates bionic resemblance in aircraft design.

The full-system model accurately predicts aircraft performance.

MBSD correlates with key performance metrics like hover duration.

Abstract

This paper introduces the Minimal Biorobotic Stealth Distance (MBSD), a novel quantitative metric to evaluate the bionic resemblance of biorobotic aircraft. Current technological limitations prevent dragonfly-inspired aircrafts from achieving optimal performance at biological scales. To address these challenges, we use the DDD-1 dragonfly-inspired aircraft, a hover-capable direct-drive aircraft, to explore the impact of the MBSD on aircraft design. Key contributions of this research include: (1) the establishment of the MBSD as a quantifiable and operable evaluation metric that influences aircraft design, integrating seamlessly with the overall design process and providing a new dimension for optimizing bionic aircraft, balancing mechanical attributes and bionic characteristics; (2) the creation and analysis of a typical aircraft in four directions: essential characteristics of the MBSD, its coupling relationship with existing performance metrics (Longest Hover Duration and Maximum Instantaneous Forward Flight Speed), multi-objective optimization, and application in a typical mission scenario; (3) the construction and validation of a full-system model for the direct-drive dragonfly-inspired aircraft, demonstrating the design model's effectiveness against existing aircraft data. Detailed calculations of the MBSD consider appearance similarity, dynamic similarity, and environmental similarity.