Initial Design and Prototype

After making the decision to design bird wing mechanism, research began. In order to make the motion accurate we needed to find our own wing motion data to compare and strive for as we developed our own device. We read about the bones and muscles of the wing, to better understand the motion and biological mechanisms creating the motion of the wing. What became clear from this research was that the multitude of joints throughout the wing length and skeletal structure would create very different movement at each joint. The articulation of these joints during takeoff, initial ascent, rapid flight, descent, turning, slow continuous flight, and many other flight types, varies greatly from one point to another on the wing. We narrowed our goal further to take this into account. We decided to make the mechanism  have relatively correct motion as a whole, but accurately position the wing tip to align with trajectories found in research.  

                                                                Desired Trajectories

After finding reasonable trajectories, the next challenge was to come up with a mechanism that could create this motion while flapping in a birdlike fashion. This was a surprisingly broad and difficult task. We turned to examples to better understand what might work as a bird wing mechanism.