Kinematic Simulation

MATLAB Modeling

We created a Matlab script to simulate the two dimensional kinematics of our mechanism and determine the optimal set of link lengths that would produce our desired wing trajectory. We initialized a set of link lengths based on what our best estimates of how the mechanism should fit together. From here, we proceed to solve our position loop equations while respective our geometric constraints. Once we had the positions and orientation of every link in the mechanism as a function of the input link angle, we proceeded to animate the expected trajectory of our mechanism. From here we manually tuned our link lengths until our expected trajectories came close to our target trajectories shown in the INSPIRATION PAGE. We noticed that small changes in link lengths near the our global ground link significantly impacted the vertical and horizontal displacements of our end effector. If choosing to recreate this project, we recommend retrieving vectorized kinematic data of your target trajectory for the tip of the wing and writing a short optimization based algorithm to solve your set of link lengths while satisfying your constraint conditions.

Our Matlab code for our simulation is attached in the appendix. 

Simulation Results: