This spatial six-bar linkage provides a compact flapping wing mechanism for a hovering micro air vehicle that controls both swing and pitch movements. I helped synthesized this mechanism using Mathematica in collaboration with a PhD student at the UC Irvine Robotics Lab.

The Mathematica code generated hundreds of solutions for given set of parameters. I further filtered the solutions to find candidate mechanism that meet these packaging requirements. I then create a Solidworks model to see the exact motion of the chosen candidate. Finally, we build the linkage to see how the mechanism actually performs.