Many of us would love the superpower to fly, and for good reason: Flight offers a crucial evolutionary advantage. Flying enables an animal to travel large distances quickly, in search of food and new ...

A LOCUST flight simulator could be the key to perfecting the ultimate surveillance machine: an artificial flying insect. The simulator can model the way wings of varying shapes and surface features ...

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 ...

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.

Classification of insects and their wingbeat kinematics -- Wingbeats and vorticity -- Evolution of flight in the insect orders -- Problems of endopterygote insect wing functional morphology -- ...

How did insect wings originate? This is a question that represents an unsolved mystery of insect evolution. Despite many years of research, it is still not entirely clear from which body structure ...

The world’s oldest known insect has been found lurking in a fossil-filled vault under a museum. The finding pushes back the origins of winged insects by 80 million years, and could shed light on the ...

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 ...