Different insects flap their wings in different manners. Understanding the variations between these modes of flight may help scientists design better and more efficient flying robots in the future.

Mosquitoes are some of the fastest-flying insects. Flapping their wings more than 800 times a second, they achieve their speed because the muscles in their wings can flap faster than their nervous ...

Robots helped achieve a major breakthrough in our understanding of how insect flight evolved. The study is a result of a six-year long collaboration between roboticists and biophysicists. Robots built ...

Researchers study the flight performance of the mountain pine beetle from a fluid mechanics and an entomological perspective. Understanding these aspects of the insect's flight could improve estimates ...

Insects have been incredibly successful in developing ways of flying, with an ultra-fast flapping mode that scientists thought had evolved multiple times over history. Now, researchers have ...

For decades, people have repeated a peculiar claim: that honeybees (and especially bumblebees) shouldn't be able to fly. According to conventional aerodynamic models, their chunky bodies and ...

Many insects fly synchronously, matching the nervous system pulses to wing movement. But smaller insects don’t have the mechanics for this and must flap their wings harder, which works only up to a ...

Researchers led by Nick Gravish, a faculty member in the UC San Diego Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, built a small flapper robot that operates in air. Robots built by engineers at ...