Design And Experimental Study Of Dragonfly-Inspired Flexible Blade To Improve Safety Of Drones

A flexible blade that is easy to fabricate and repair is presented: It has a low impact load when colliding with obstacles, and can generate enough thrust for drone flight. The flexible blade has a camber structure that mimics the feature of dragonflies to increase wing stiffness. It makes the blade's deformation decline when it receives a lift force and drag force. A commercially available drone that conformed to standards was used to design, fabricate, and test the flexible blade. The flexible blade consists of a pivot column made by three-dimensional printer and a polyethylene film. The design variables were defined as values with thrust and efficiency that were determined to be similar to those of the original blade through experiments. Experiments for safety verification were conducted by comparing the impact and sharpness of the original and the flexible blades. Experimental results show that the flexible blade's impact force is approximately a tenth of the original blade's impact force, and only the original blade damaged a 100-mu m film obstacle. In general terms, the suggested flexible blade is safer and more economical than a plastic blade, in addition to having performance close to that of the original blade during flight.