Insect-Inspired Flapping-Wing Robots: Design, Analysis, and Flight

This book provides the whole design process and details of a two-winged tailless flapping-wing robot. It shares experience in bioinspiration related to the development of the KUBeetle. It overviews research related to flapping wings, related aerodynamics, and design and fabrication of the KUBeetle, including considerations for selecting a driving motor and predicting flapping frequency. It explains prediction of aerodynamic forces using the unsteady blade element theory (UBET) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with the commercial software ANSYS Fluent.

Features:

• Describes the latest breakthrough and technology in the design, fabrication, and control of the insect-like flapping-wing robots
• Addresses the challenges in this field, such as power efficiency and flight stability, and provides a roadmap for future research
• Showcases the potential applications of these robots
• Describes unsteady blade element theory as a simpler method for aerodynamic force estimation compared to the CFD
• Details two different designs of control moment generators that are essential for attitude control

This book is aimed at graduate students and researchers in robotics, aerospace, and mechanical engineering.

Hoon Cheol Park received his BS (1985) and MS (1987) degrees from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, and his PhD degree from the University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA, in 1994. He joined the Department of Aerospace Engineering at Konkuk University, Seoul, Korea, in 1995. Dr. Park is currently a professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mobility Engineering at Konkuk University, Seoul, Korea. His professional experience includes working as a research engineer at Kia Motors (1986-1988) and as a senior researcher at the Korea Aerospace Research Institute (1994-1995). His PhD research focused on the finite element method, and his recent research interests are primarily in biomimetics and bioinspired flight. He has published approximately 140 SCI/SCIE journal papers, most of which are as the corresponding author, including two papers published in Science in 2020 and in Nature in 2024. His research laboratory at Konkuk University has been recognized as one of the most active teams in biomimetic flying-robot research, evidenced by two review papers in 2015 and 2017. He has served as an editorial board member and associate editor of the Journal of Bionic Engineering since 2007 and 2013, respectively, and as an associate editor of the International Journal of Advanced Robotic Systems since 2013. He joined the editorial board of Bioinspiration & Biomimetics in 2019. He served as the president of the Korea Society of Mechanical Engineers, Division of Bioengineering, in 2015, and as vice president for several years. Internationally, he led the International Society of Intelligent Unmanned Systems (ISIUS) as president from 2017 to 2019.

Hoang-Vu Phan received MS and PhD degrees in biomimetics and intelligent microsystems from Konkuk University, Seoul, South Korea in 2012 and 2017, respectively, and BE degree in aerospace engineering from the Vietnam National University - Ho Chi Minh city University of Technology, Ho Chi Minh, Vietnam in 2010. He is currently an Assistant Professor in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno, USA. From 2021 to 2025, he was a Senior Postdoctoral Scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland. Prior to joining EPFL, he was a non-tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Smart Vehicle Engineering, Konkuk University, Seoul, Korea (2017-2021). His research interests include biologically inspired aerial robotics, multimodal locomotion, flapping-wing flight, and biomechanics of animal flight. He has published more than 30 papers in prestigious journals across various disciplines. He has moreover presented his work at numerous renowned international conferences. Dr. Phan currently serves on the editorial boards of npj Robotics (Nature Portfolio), International Journal of Micro Air Vehicles, and Aerospace.