Accommodating unobservability to control flight attitude with optic flow.

Attitude control is an essential flight capability. Whereas flying robots commonly rely on accelerometers for estimating attitude, flying insects lack an unambiguous sense of gravity. Despite the established role of several sense organs in attitude stabilization, the dependence of flying insects on an internal gravity direction estimate remains unclear.

Flying Into the Wind: Insects and Bio-Inspired Micro-Air-Vehicles With a Wing-Stroke Dihedral Steer Passively Into Wind-Gusts.

Natural fliers utilize passive and active flight control strategies to cope with windy conditions. This capability makes them incredibly agile and resistant to wind gusts. Here, we study how insects achieve this, by combining Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) analyses of flying fruit flies with freely-flying robotic experiments.