5) Kinematic Analysis- Penguin Wings

The next step was to perform a kinematic analysis on the rotation of the penguin’s wings. A rod, grounded to the base of the mechanism, is connected to the wings. This connection acts as a pint joint for the wings. The body of the penguin pushes the wings up and down changing the angle of the wings (Figure 10).

Figure 10: Schematic of wing angle. The height of the body of the penguin determines the angle of the wing.

I made one assumption for this kinematic analysis: When the height of the penguin body is 0 cm, y_wing is -0.9 cm. Therefore, the angle of the wing (ɵ_wing) can be determined using the following formula:

(3)

Using this formula, I determined the angular position of the wings. Then, I used the gradient function in Matlab to determine the angular velocity and angular acceleration (Figure 11).

Figure 11: Penguin wing angle (degrees), wing angular velocity (degrees/s), and wing angular acceleration (degrees/s^2) versus time (s).