Bioinspired Robotics: Design, Modeling and Control of Flapping-Wing Micro Air Vehicles

Dear Colleagues,

Natural flyers include birds, bats, and insects, which fly by flapping their wings with highly agile manoeuvres. They have inspired tremendous research into flapping-wing micro air vehicles during the last twenty years. At small scales, flapping-wing micro air vehicles have several advantages over their counter parts with fixed wings and rotary wings, relating to flight energy efficiency, a wide flight envelope (hovering, forward-backward flight, and sideways flight), agile manoeuvres, collision tolerance and flight recovery against collisions, and more camouflage with their naturally bio-inspired appearance. However, research on flapping-wing micro air vehicles is still in a premature stage due to several key technical challenges, such as complex flapping and altitude control mechanisms, unscalable avionic systems, and actuators. Moreover, another challenging problem is how to systematically design and optimize flapping-wing micro air vehicles using a combination of flapping mechanisms, flapping wing unsteady aerodynamics, avionics, and power trains including actuators and batteries. Solving these technical issues will break new ground and enable many new practical applications in the future.

This Special Issue, entitled “Bioinspired Robotics: Design, Modeling and Control of Flapping-Wing Micro Air Vehicles”, aims to collect articles related to the development of bio-inspired flapping-wing micro air vehicles to introduce them to readers in relevant research areas.

Dr. Quoc Nguyen
Guest Editor

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• flapping wing aerodynamics
• ornithopter
• flapping-wing micro air vehicles
• tailless flapping wing
• MAVs
• bio-inspired robotics
• biomimetics
• flapping flight
• insect flight
• bat flight
• bird flight
• bio-inspired sensing
• flapping wing control