Nature-inspired flight

In a new issue of the journal Bioinspiration & Biomimntics, a special section is devoted to nature-inspired flight. There is an emphasis on MAVs of various sorts, but also purely animal flight papers have been included. The issue has been edited by two well-known figures in our field, David Lentink and Andy Biewener. The latter is handling most of our mansucripts submitted to JEB. The two editors write an introductory essay, following by the original papers. Have a look here. There will be reason to return to these papers.

MAVs navigating without GPS

Engineers at MIT has built a MAV that is able to navigate inside a complicated environment, where GPS navigation is denied. The vehicle is perhaps mainly interesting for its navigations skills rather than it's flight performance. The MAV has a laser scanning the environment to build up an image about the surrounding topology. At the recent International Bat Research Conference in Prague, there were talks about using sonar systems similar to those of bats to navigate the environment. The real challenge will be to combine any of these navigation based systems with a MAV that uses flapping flight, and flies like a bat or an insect. A film showing the MAV flying indoors can be seen by clicking here. The accompanying paper is not very new, published in Science in late 2009.