Butterfly Flight Videos May Lead To 'Micro Aerial Vehicle' Military Drones

What could match the agility and grace of a butterfly? How about a butterfly robot?

Engineers at Johns Hopkins University are pointing their high-speed video cameras at the wings of butterflies to help design the next generation of flying robots.

The research, funded by U.S. defense agencies, is intended to create what are called "micro aerial vehicles," or MAVs - bug-sized aircrafts that could aid in the reconnaissance, search-and-rescue, and environmental monitoring missions that typically put human lives at risk.

"For military missions in particular, these MAVs must be able to fly successfully through complex urban environments, where there can be tight spaces and turbulent gusts of wind," researcher Tiras Lin, an undergraduate at the university's Whiting School of Engineering, said in a written statement. "These flying robots will need to be able to turn quickly. But one area in which MAVs are lacking is maneuverability."

Lin and graduate student Lingxiao Zheng turned to a particularly elusive species of butterfly to do their research: painted ladies. The wings of these bright orange insects flap too fast for the naked eye to tell exactly how they're moving, so the students are resorting to high-resolution videocameras that capture 3,000 frames each second.

"Butterflies flap their wings about 25 times per second,” Lin said. “That’s why we had to take so many pictures.”

What have the photos shown? That butterflies and ice skaters have something in common. As Lin explained:

“Ice skaters who want to spin faster bring their arms in close to their bodies and extend their arms out when they want to slow down. These positions change the spatial distribution of a skater’s mass and modify their moment of inertia; this in turn affects the rotation of the skater’s body. An insect may be able to do the same thing with its body and wings.”

The scientists say they're hopeful that in addition to aiding MAV design, their research will be of interest to biologists who study insect flight.

For more on the advances being made in flying robot research, check out University of Pennsylvania's video of a freaky swarm of 'nano-quadrotors'.

Comments

[Youngman Grand Esq]

01:57 PM on 02/06/2012

Very cool stuff being done on insect flight in this lab and others (e.g., http://www.lifeslittlemysteries.com/1150-how-bees-fly.html). All that's missing is the small, light-weight battery/power source technology to keep these micro-bots in the air more than a few minutes.

[tg9563]

12:21 AM on 02/05/2012

Why do these things need to fly? Everyone know that if a butterfly flaps its wings in South America it will cause a tidal wave in China. So just drive one of those things down to Columbia, turn it on, sit back and enjoy.

[Barbara0817]

12:27 PM on 02/04/2012

Butterflies are so pretty in the spring

[martinvm]

02:30 AM on 02/04/2012

Very cool, but scary too. I wouldn't want somebody bugging my conversations with a micro bug that I didn't even know was there. But still, very cool!

[oneeasyrider]

06:58 PM on 02/03/2012

Military funding, of course! M.I.C. is a gorilla with an insatiable appetite. Meanwhile, 25 million unemployed, 100,000,000 living at or below poverty and growing.

If no other application can be imagined, other, than military...what's the point?

[Junius Gallio]

10:27 PM on 02/03/2012

The government can, of course, spend the money and create "make-work" jobs ... but would you want to spend 40 hours a week knowing you were doing something that had no real use, even if it did draw a paycheck?

Government tends to be fairly inefficient at creating jobs. For all the smoke and mirrors the presidential candidates are playing with (and yes, I do mean ALL the candidates, including President Obama), private industry is, and has always been, the best at creating jobs, and the government has very little effect on whether, or how many, jobs industry creates.

[AnthropologistAmongApes]

10:39 PM on 02/03/2012

Government creates every defense job; and it creates both wealth and valuable jobs when it spends on infrastructure. Private industry merely performs the work as a subcontractor.

[oneeasyrider]

10:52 PM on 02/03/2012

I've read many of your posts and find you to be knowledgeable and reasonable. However, I don't agree with you this time.

While some benefits arise from M.I.C. investment, mostly, it's a black hole, unlike NASA. And NASA is basically government...and for that matter, so is the military, except when departments are privatized; essentially squeezing profit out of cheaper labor.

While private enterprise is a useful tool for providing goods and services, there are many shortcomings. Government can and does fill in the gap by creating an economic current from top of the economic pyramid back to the base where consumer demand originates. Government fills in the gap by investing in infrastructure, R/D, education, regulation, social programs, tech investment (NASA, etc.), and govt./private enterprise investment.

For example, there's pent up demand for roof-top solar panel installation. If govt. would provide funding administered by all energy providers around the country, for all interested homeowners willing to participate...everyone would quickly learn about legitimate benefit...and demand for electric cars would follow. Foreign trade deficit would go down and we would significantly reduce CO2 emissions. Tens of thousands of jobs would be created all spurred by govt. investment...which isn't going to happen anytime soon, if we wait for private enterprise. Oh, it will happen eventually, but much more slowly.

[Anybodyseenthepopos]

02:57 PM on 02/03/2012

I want the Pentagons next flyswatter contract!!

[onionboy]

05:41 PM on 02/03/2012

The Patriot Swatter.

[onewhothinks]

11:09 AM on 02/03/2012

For all that people worry about how this kind of technology could be abused, I'm hopeful for the positive uses.

I wonder how this new information could affect larger flying devices, like those quadrotors? I won't begin to understand any thing about aviation engineering beyond "airplane wings create lift," but it would be nice if this benefits more than just the little machines.

[ProudToBeVeryLiberal]

02:14 PM on 02/03/2012

Quadrotors (a.k.a. quadricopters) aren't exactly cutting edge, in fact they're firmly established commercially and quite cheap (the most popular model -- Parrot AR Drone -- costs only about $300 and its Chinese knockoffs about $100-150.) MAV's, however, are technologically way more advanced and require a degree of sophistication in manufacturing that's currently beyond mainstream industrial technology.

[Junius Gallio]

10:31 PM on 02/03/2012

Rotator-type flyers (helicopters and the quadrotors you mention) and fixed-wing aircraft (airplanes) work on quite different physics principles. "Flapping-wing" flight is only suitable for very small payloads--the larger the payload, the greater the needed material strength for the wings. Unfortunately, the material strength requirement goes up at a faster rate than the payload.

[cuoi]

03:20 PM on 02/05/2012

Spider webs have more tensile strength than our best steel. Engineers now understand more how webs can carry loads and are using knowledge to design buildings. Perhaps a wing is just a few flaps away?