Principal Areas of Research
We design miniature flying vehicles: tiny man-made insects that fly. Applications include inconspicuous reconnaissance and navigation through space filled with obstacles. High-speed photography, wind-tunnel testing, computer modeling of insect-wing motion and study of insect anatomy (sensing, flight muscle, and wing structure) feed the robotic project of creating artificial flying insects.
Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) are inspired by the need for efficient flyers that can take off vertically, glide, hover, change directions quickly to avoid obstacles and land vertically like flying insects over a significant distance without refueling. Military reconnaissance and civilian surveillance over disaster sites where ground travel is difficult and the air is filled with obstacles are but a few of unlimited applications. Design and manufacturing of the MAVs should be most successful through the intimate study of real insects that fly. The first step of the project is the study of insects in tethered (in wind tunnel) and natural flight through high-speed photography to record the wing motion during the flight. Concomitant studies of the anatomy of insect flight muscle, click mechanism to drive the high speed flapping, and the structure of the wings are performed. The photographically recorded motion of the wings, substantiated by the kinetics study of the flight muscle, will be used as the input of the computer modeling of the fluid-wing interaction which produce flow field in the air and stress field in the flexible wings. The numerical results for the former will be verified in the wind tunnel through the flow visualization of the air created by the insect wing motion. The fluid results will be used to determine the optimum wing shape and motion to produce the best thrust and lift under the various flight conditions. The stress results in the wing is used for the structural design of the artificial wings based on the membrane and veins. The second step is the manufacture of the flying vehicles. The material selection, shape design of wings-thorax-legs, energy supply, locomotion principle, wing motion, and navigation sensors must be carefully implemented. Once again learning from true insects shall be the driving principle.
The insect wings are corrugated plates with the network of veins. They can be modeled as folded plates with stiffeners by the BEM and the FEM. During flapping these wings undergo large deformation to produce maximum aerodynamic force. Nonlinear FEM is used to deal with the fluid-structure interaction in which the large elastic deformation of the wings along with the fluid flow field surrounding the wings are considered. I also design simple flapping wings for the MAV using the FSI analysis.
Go to INSECT WINGS site for close up pictures of insect wings.
Go to INSECT FLIGHT site for image sequences, movies and pictures of insects in flight.

Go to EXPERIMENTS ON BLINDING THE EYE of insects.

FEM FLUID-STRUCTURE INTERACTION analysis of a 3-D flexible insect wing model. See also a summary for a 2-D flexible wing model. (Collaboration with D. Ishihara, Kyusyu Institute of Technology, Iizuka, Japan.)
