Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS’12).

Abstract Micro-aerial vehicles (MAV) and their promising applications—such as undetected sur-veillance or exploration of environments with little space for land-based maneuvers—are a well-known topic in the field of aerial robotics. Inspired by high maneuverability and agile flight of insects, over the past two decades a significant amount of effort has been dedicated to research on flapping-wing MAVs, most of which aim to address unique challenges in morphological construction, force production, and control strategy. Although re-markable solutions have been found for sufficient lift generation, effective methods for motion con-trol still remain an open problem. The focus of this paper is to investigate general flight control mechanisms that are potentially used by real in-sects, thereby providing inspirations for flapping-wing MAV control. Through modeling the insect flight muscles, we show that stiffness and set poin