Micro-aerial vehicles (MAV) and their promising applications – such as undetected surveillance or exploration of environments with little space for land-based maneuvers – are a well-known topic in the field of aerial robotics. Inspired by high maneuverability and agile flight of insects, over the past two decades a significant amount of effort has been dedicated to research on flapping-wing MAV...

Insect wings are flexible. For rigid wings lift enhancing unsteady aerodynamics mechanisms, such as delayed stall via leading-edge vortices (LEVs), wake-capture, and rotational forces, characterize the lift generation of a hovering insect. We have uncovered a novel mechanism that fruit fly size insects can utilize to further increase the lift by adjusting its wing shape passively: A pair of a L...

Flapping wings continuously create and send vortices into their wake, while imparting downward momentum into the surrounding fluid. However, experimental studies concerning the details of the three-dimensional vorticity distribution and evolution in the far wake are limited. In this study, the three-dimensional vortex wake structure in both the near and far field of a dynamically scaled flappin...

Complex behaviors of flying insects require interactions among sensory-neural systems, wing actuation biomechanics, and flapping-wing aerodynamics. Here, we review our recent progress in understanding these layers for maneuvering and stabilization flight of fruit flies. Our approach combines kinematic data from flying insects and aerodynamic simulations to distill reduced-order mathematical mod...

Abstract—In recent decades, flapping wing aerodynamics has attracted great interest. Understanding the physics of biological flyers such as birds and insects can help improve the performance of micro air vehicles. The present research focuses on the aerodynamics of insect-like flapping wing flight with the approach of numerical computation. Insect model of hawkmoth is adopted in the numerical s...

All animals flap their wings in powered flight to provide both lift and thrust, yet few human-engineered designs do so. When combined with flexible wing surfaces, the resulting unsteady fluid flows and interactions in flapping flight can be complex to describe, understand, and model. Here, a simple modified actuator disk is used in a quasi-steady description of the net aerodynamic lift forces o...

Hummingbirds (Trochilidae) are widely known for their insect-like flight strokes characterized by high wing beat frequency, small muscle strains and a highly supinated wing orientation during upstroke that allows for lift production in both halves of the stroke cycle. Here, we show that hummingbirds achieve these functional traits within the limits imposed by a vertebrate endoskeleton and muscl...

The present paper addresses the aeroelastic optimization of a membrane wing. Aerodynamic optimization of a deforming wing has been done in recent work by Walker, Patil, and Canfield. The deformation shapes required for maximum thrust and thrust efficiency were calculated. In the present work, the maximum thrust for the membrane wing is calculated by optimizing the tension in the membrane so tha...

The derivation of the nonlinear dynamics of flapping wing micro air vehicles is presented. Simulation results investigate differences in the position and orientation of the body due to differing wing masses and aerodynamic modeling choices. The flapping wing micro air vehicle is modeled as a system of three rigid bodies: a body and two wings. Themass of the wings, and their associatedmass and i...

The capability of flapping wings to generate lift is currently evaluated by using the lift coefficient CL, a dimensionless number that is derived from the basal equation that calculates the steady-state lift coefficient CL for fixed wings. In contrast to its simple and direct application to fixed wings, the equation for CL requires prior knowledge of the flow field along the wing span, which re...