Insects’ flight including how they initiate the flight, how they produce the aerodynamic forces, how they adjust the flight forces, how they control the body motion and perform the maneuvers and how the central neural system decide on all of that and command the right organ to do the right job, is yet mysterious to the scientists. This tiny system of the insect has lots of complicated details that scientists in wide variety of the researches are working on. What we are doing in insects’ flight dynamic research group in WSU is to study and analyze insects’ flight from a more general perspective that we call it here “system level point of view”. We are studying different properties of the insect’s system that makes it capable to behave this way. We are trying to understand the solutions and the strategies that nature have found to integrate such a small and efficient system with such complicated and outstanding capabilities that human being is still far away to understand.

Controlling the flight forces fast and efficiently, insects are able to perform complicated maneuvers. We know that the aerodynamic forces are produced because of the flapping motion of the wings. Also scientists have observed wings kinematic changes once the insect is performing maneuvers or intending to alter the flight forces direction or magnitude. The connection between the flight forces alternations and the flapping kinematic modification are not quiet known and classified yet. What we are doing here is to study the possible control mechanism that insects might use to adjust their flight forces quickly and efficiently. Also we are investigating the connection between these alternations in flight forces and the modifications insects produce to their wings’ kinematic parameters.

Tiny steering muscles are known to be responsible for the wing’s kinematic changes in insects. There are bunch of those in the insect’s hinge which typically few of them activate during a flapping cycle. Each of the steering muscles has a preferred range of the activation phase within the wing’s stroke. Scientists know that firing the specific steering muscle the insects are able to modify their wing’s flapping motion and consequently the flight forces. What is still unknown is the classified correlation between these two.So here using our powerful aerodynamic forces computational tools and modeling the wings dynamic system, we are simulating the effect of the steering muscles’ firing on the flight forces control.

From system point of view flexibility of the insect’s wing or body can be translated to more available state variables. Degree of coupling between these variables, their available range of change and the sensitivity of the final system states to these changes can determine the variety of the possible final system states and how robust these states are. In limited performance situations, one can imagine how such a system can approximate a specific final state by a different combination of the healthy state variables. Here we are conducting experiments on the damage tolerant behavior of the different insects’ wing.We are also developing the theoretical model to investigate the correlation between this behavior and the wing’s flexibility.