Week 6

Plan for this week:

This week we present our final poster.

SESSION 6

 (October 18th, 2014, 9AM – 12PM in room 193, at Grand Canyon University)

Project:  Q/A and Final PowerPoint Presentation and Poster Presentation of Completed Work on: “Modeling, Analysis, and Design of a Mechanical Flapping Wing Bird Micro Air Vehicle (MAV)”

Principle Investigator: Michael Thompson

Department: Mechanical Engineering, Arizona State University

Phone: 602-373-9921

Email: mjthomp3@asu.edu  

Web: https://sites.google.com/a/asu.edu/michael-thompson/home

NASA Space Grant: I believe I can fly! STEAM Program (Fall 2014 - Spring 2015)

Overview of Project

In this project, the students will present their finalized work that encompassed a designed, built, and analyzed flapping mechanical birds. This is important because the students will gain understanding on what factors impact the performance of designing and testing micro air vehicles.

Problem Statement

It has been demonstrated that having tangible interfaces benefits the learning process of young students (Schneider, Wallace, Blikstein, & Pea, 2013). Moreover, the mechanical bird poster and flyer and other robots such as the arduino car robot has been proposed as a suitable tool to satisfy education in STEM areas (Hoffer, 2012). Therefore, this work will directly impact the community with the STEAM program where the mechanical bird will be showcased on a weekly basis to spark interest in engineering.

Approaches Taken  

The flapping bird kits are a good teaching tool because of their modular and versatile capabilities. It is also not expensive and compact. These characteristics make it suitable for a lot of low-cost applications.

Major Developments, Accomplishments, and Conclusions

Students from 3rd-8th grade were able to grasp and visually interpret from their Matlab programming code and data analysis how changing different parameters in the mechanical flapping bird affects its flight performance. The students accomplished the following:

(1)   Modeled and designed a mechanical flapping bird;

(2)   Developed/built 2 mechanical flapping birds (a red and blue);

(3)   Collected experimental flight data on their built vehicles

(4)   Analyzed the data through Matlab engineering software

(5)   Developed a poster and presented their findings on how changing different parameters in the mechanical flapping bird affects its flight performance.

Directions for Future Research

Future work will exploit development of building a more advanced version of a micro air vehicle with a motor. The motor can have sustained flight and will stay in flight longer letting the students to be able to collect more data and build their mechanical engineering skill set to tackle real world problems.