Dragondrop: a novel passive mechanism for aerial righting in the dragonfly.

ABSTRACT: Dragonflies perform dramatic aerial manoeuvres when chasing targets but glide for periods during cruising flights. This makes dragonflies a great system to explore the role of passive stabilizing mechanisms that do not compromise manoeuvrability. We challenged dragonflies by dropping them from selected inverted attitudes and collected 6-degrees-of-freedom aerial recovery kinematics via custom motion capture techniques. From these kinematic data, we performed rigid-body inverse dynamics to reconstruct the forces and torques involved in righting behaviour. We found that inverted dragonflies typically recover themselves with the shortest rotation from the initial body inclination. Additionally, they exhibited a strong tendency to pitch-up with their head leading out of the manoeuvre, despite

SUBMITTER: Fabian ST 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7893233 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Feb

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature