Materials, Structure, and Dynamics of Insect Wings as Bioinspiration for MAVs

Insects are the dominant group of animals on Earth – with approximately one million named species, they far outnumber all other terrestrial animals and occur on all continents (Triplehorn and Johnson, 2005). One of the keys to their success has been the evolution of flight, which led to a huge diversification of the primary structure associated with flight, the wings. Insect wings have evolved over hundreds of millions of years to play a wide variety of roles, both related to and independent from flight. This has resulted in numerous design trade-offs, as well as constraints related to available developmental pathways and phylogenetic history (i.e., each species “inherited” a certain wing design from its ancestor, and evolutionary modifications must start from this inherited design). The earliest insects had four wings (two pairs, with a foreand hindwing on each side), and some insects such as dragonflies and damselflies have retained four indepen-