Individuals allocate considerable amounts of energy to movement, which ultimately affects their ability to survive and reproduce. Birds fly by flapping their wings, which is dependent on the chemical energy produced by muscle work, or use soaring-gliding flight, in which chemical energy is replaced with energy harvested from moving air masses, such as thermals. Flapping flight requires more ene...

Flapping-wing robotic insects are small, highly maneuverable flying robots inspired by biologicalinsects and useful for a wide range of tasks, including exploration, environmental monitoring, searchand rescue, and surveillance. Recently, robotic insects driven by piezoelectric actuators have achievedthe important goal of taking off with external power; however, fully autonomous operation requir...

Many research studies have investigated the characteristics of bird flights as a source bioinspiration for design flapping-wing micro air vehicles. However, to best authors’ knowledge, no drone targeted exploitation aerodynamic benefits associated with avian group formation flight. Therefore, in this work, conceptual novel multi-flapping-wing that incorporates multiple pairs wings arranged V-sh...

M. J. S. Rudwick and others postulate ‘rhythmic-flow’ feeding for the Permian richthofeniacean bi-achiopods, whereas R. E. Grant claims that they fed by normal ciliary action. Suspension-feeding has two components, current generation and food capture; normal brachiopod lophophores d o both, but this is neither universal nor compulsory among animals. Opening and closing the richthofeniid shell g...

Within the growing family of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), flapping-wing micro aerial vehicles (MAV) are a relatively new field of research. Inspired by small size and agile flight of insects and birds, these systems offer a great potential for applications such as reconnaissance, surveillance, search and rescue, mapping, etc. Nevertheless, practicality of these vehicles depends on how we add...

The effect of wing flexibility in hoverflies was investigated using an at-scale mechanical model. Unlike dynamically-scaled models, an at-scale model can include all phenomena related to motion and deformation of the wing during flapping. For this purpose, an at-scale polymer wing mimicking a hoverfly was fabricated using a custom micromolding process. The wing has venation and corrugation prof...

THERE is a growing interest in the aerospace community in the development of robotic micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) to learn and mimic avian flight. MAVs fly in low-Reynolds-number regimes of 10 to 10, which corresponds to that of small birds or bats [1]. MAVs with wings equipped with multiple degrees of freedom such as flapping, wing twist, and sweep provide greater payload capability than insec...

This paper reports the computer simulation of a flapping flexible filament in a flowing soap film using the immersed boundary method. Our mathematical formulation includes filament mass and elasticity, gravity, air resistance, and the two wires that bound the flowing soap film. The incompressible viscous Navier–Stokes equations, which are used to describe the motion of the soap film and filamen...