Insights from the study, which was published online April 5 in Physical Review Letters, could someday help build better flying robots.
Fruit flies beat their wings about once every 4 milliseconds — much faster than their neurons can fire — and can turn 120 degrees in 18 wing beats. This made study co-author Itai Cohen of Cornell University wonder, “How much of the wing motion is being controlled by the insect, and how much is going along for the ride, being controlled by aerodynamics?”To investigate, Cohen and his colleagues set up three high-speed cameras trained at the center of a box holding about 10 flies (see video below). A fly crossing the center of the box triggered the cameras to start rolling at 8,000 frames per second. At the same time, a disk of LED lights projected a rotating striped pattern on the inside of the box to trick the flies into making a U-turn.
“The flies see this, and it makes them dizzy,” says study co-author Attila Bergou of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who helped perform the experiments as a graduate student at Cornell. “It generates very reliable and repeatable turns in these flies.”
The physicists analyzed the videos to extract detailed information on the wings’ positions with respect to the body.
“I was surprised that they were able to get it to work as well as they did,” comments Ty Hedrick of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. “Getting the uncertainty of these measurements low enough that you can see what you need to see is difficult.”
The team found that when the fly turns, one wing tilts more than the other, similar to the way a rower pulls one oar harder than the other to make a boat turn. Thanks to aerodynamics, a wing-tilt difference of just 9 degrees is enough to send a fly off in another direction.
“Essentially these insects are swimming through the air, using drag forces to row themselves in whichever direction they want,” Cohen says.
Further analysis using computer models of the fly and aerodynamic simulations showed that the fly’s wing joint acts like a torsional spring, the kind found in wind-up toys or old clocks. To change its wing tilt and set up a turn, all the fly has to do is twitch the muscle that controls the spring.
“The insects don’t have to do any thinking whatsoever,” Cohen says. “They have a natural system that provides just the right amount of torque to the wing.”
The physicists are planning comparative studies in other flying insects, like bees and dragonflies. Cohen hopes the findings could help design more-maneuverable flying robots that take advantage of insect aerodynamics.
“Really the idea is, how do we start to build more efficient and smaller robots that take advantage of aerodynamics to do the things they do, rather than brute force the way we usually do these things?” Cohen says. “We’re in the dark ages as far as building anything like that. We’re nowhere in the ballpark.
