Wing-flapping robot helps explain the evolution of insect flight

Some insects can flap their wings so rapidly that it’s impossible for instructions from their brains to entirely control the behaviour. Building tiny flapping robots has helped researchers shed light on how they evolved to do this. For some insects, including mosquitoes, their brain signals and flapping are out of sync. After the initial signal to contract, the insects’ muscles undergo additional contract-relax cycles before they even receive another impulse from the brain. This so-called “asynchronous” flight allows them to flap their wings at exceptionally high rates. Several researchers from Georgia Tech set out to study the evolutionary history of this form of flight. Those researchers include Simon Sponberg, Dunn Family Associate Professor in the School of Physics and the School of Biological Sciences; Brett Aiello, former postdoctoral scholar in Sponberg's Agile Systems Lab; Ethan Wold, Ph.D. scholar in the School of Biological Sciences and the Quantitative Biosciences Graduate Program; and Jeff Gau, Ph.D. scholar in the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Interdisciplinary Bioengineering Graduate Program. (This research was also covered at India Education Diary, ArsTechnica, UC San Diego, Earth.com and Phys.org.)