When it comes to flying, the fly reigns supreme. This two-winged insect’s sophisticated flying behavior enables it to make sharp turns, aim at targets and hover – traits which make the insect an ideal prototype for tiny micro air vehicles (MAVs). However, the same flying finesse also presents challenges for scientists trying to investigate, observe and understand these complex creatures in their natural environments. Now, scientists from the U.K. demonstrate that mathematical modeling may provide adequate complementary information for advances in MAV technology.

Airplane technology has been evolving for more than 100 years, with much attention to size increase: In 2005, for example, the Airbus380 was unveiled. The plane can carry up to 800 people and is as long as a football field.

On the other end of the spectrum, MAVs – which scale down to around 150 mm, about 10 times larger than a real fly – have only emerged in science labs since the late ‘90s. Because the aerodynamics of airplanes don’t work for such minute flying machines, engineers and biologists have looked to nature to mimic her millions-year-old evolution of insect aerodynamics.

Up to now, scientists have primarily learned about insects’ flying behavior empirically – for example, by tethering flies inside a virtual reality cage and manipulating the flies’ environment to observe flight patterns and motions.

“[Tethering means that] insect behavior may differ from free flight,” wrote Rafal Zbikowski, Salman Ansari and Kevin Knowles in a recent issue of the new journal Bioinspiration and Biomimetics. “Further progress, especially in the context of MAVs, can be achieved by the complementary information derived from appropriate mathematical modeling. The focus here is on a means of computing the data not easily available from experiments and also on making mathematical predictions to suggest new experiments.”

http://www.physorg.com/news75969014.html