The next meeting of the Cambridge Entomological Club will be held on Tuesday, November 12 at 07:30 PM in in room 101 of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, 24 Oxford Street in Cambridge. Andrew Mountcastle and Sawyer Fuller will present a talk entitled Engineering and Reverse-Engineering Insect Flight.

Flapping flight is one of the key innovations which make insects the most successful group of animals on the planet, and it has captivated engineers who wish to build micro air vehicles capable of similar performance. In this broad-ranging presentation, Drs. Mountcastle and Fuller will talk about their research on insect flight. Dr. Mountcastle will talk about insect wing form and function. Insect wings are flexible structures that bend and twist in ways that are actually adaptive for a variety of functional demands. He will show how wing flexibility enhances load-lifting and aerodynamic force production in bumblebees, and also helps mitigate collision damage in the wings of wasps and bumblebees.

Dr. Fuller will talk about how these animals use their tiny, low resolution eyes to sense their motion and control flight, and how to build robots inspired by their control strategies. He will show how he and his colleagues control a Robobee (picture below,) an insect-sized flapping-wing flying vehicle the sized of a bumblebee, using a small number of visual sensors. He will also talk about how flies control their forward velocity using both vision and wind sensing because vision alone is too slow. This research approach is what Sawyer calls “cyclic biological robotics” – studying biology for robotic inspiration, using this robotics to bring up refined questions for biology, and repeating.

The meeting is free and open to the public. Snacks will be provided and you are also welcome to join us at 6:00 PM for an informal pre-meeting dinner at Cambridge Common.