Aerodynamic characteristics and pitching adjusting mechanism of the flying squirrel with deployed patagium

Abstract

The flying squirrel has a balanced amphibious ability on land and air, especially the ability to glide using their patagium, which makes it an excellent biomimetic object in the design and development of multimodal locomotion robots. This paper presents the study of aerodynamic characteristics and pitching adjusting mechanism of the flying squirrel with deployed patagium. A 3D geometric model of the flying squirrel with unfolded wing membrane was obtained using 3D scanning technique. Then a simulation analysis based on computational fluid dynamics software and a wind tunnel experiment on the animal specimen were carried out to analyze and evaluate the aerodynamic characteristics. After that, the pitching adjusting mechanism of flying squirrels during gliding was numerical simulated by establishing the pitching dynamics model. The results from above research not only enrich our understanding of gliding mechanism of flying squirrels, but also provide important biological inspiration for the design and development of multimodal robots in the future.