From houseflies to honeybees, insects inspire us with flight skills just beyond the grasp of our technology. Z. Jane Wang, a professor at Cornell University, is working to close this gap between inspiration and implementation. Wang’s recent work is on dragonflies, and here she has found some peculiarities.

For example, "an airfoil uses aerodynamic lift to carry its weight. But the dragonfly uses a lot of aerodynamic drag to carry its weight. That is weird, because with airplanes you always think about minimizing drag. You never think about using drag."

Implementing a dragonfly MAV is still an elusive goal, hopefully made somewhat nearer by Wang’s research. The research and prior art is summarized in her recent paper, Dissecting Insect Flight. This and more can be found on her group's website, which appropriately enough is dragonfly.tam.cornell.edu.

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Written by John Romano Rafol ( This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) on 2006-03-03 00:27:50

I maybe dreaming but, my idea of making the dragon fly MAV will be to fuse organic and mechanical components to produce a feasible flying insect. If the organic part can supply energy in the same way that dragon fly uses its muscular energy, i think it would be next step to evolution, the only problem is how to nourish the organic part so that it produce/recharge energy. Who knows, if its feasible, maybe can make a large organic material that forms muscles which you then attach mechanical wings and then u stimulate the organic muscles so that a flapping motion can be achieved or something... Organic, replenishable energy, is that even possible?

Written by William

on 2006-03-03 07:49:05

Joh,
I'd hardly call that the next step in evolution, as the whole notion of evolution is diabolically opposed to design. However, there are folks working on such devices, but more along the lines of artificially controlling the animal, not actually implanting mechanical structures in them.

Here's a start Dr. Maysam Ghovanloo's research

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