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Abstract Flapping flight of animals has captured the interest of researchers due to their impressive flight capabilities across diverse environments including mountains, oceans, forests, and urban areas. Despite the significant progress made in understanding flapping flight, high-altitude flight as showcased by many migrating animals remains underexplored. At high-altitudes, air density is low, and it is challenging to produce lift. Here we demonstrate a first lift-off of a flapping wing robot in a low-density environment through wing size and motion scaling. Force measurements showed that the lift remained high at 0.14 N despite a 66% reduction of air density from the sea-level condition. The flapping amplitude increased from 148 to 233 degrees, while the pitch amplitude remained nearly constant at 38.2 degrees. The combined effect is that the flapping-wing robot benefited from the angle of attack that is characteristic of flying animals. Our results suggest that it is not a simple increase in the flapping frequency, but a coordinated increase in the wing size and reduction in flapping frequency enables the flight in lower density condition. The key mechanism is to preserve the passive rotations due to wing deformation, confirmed by a bioinspired scaling relationship. Our results highlight the feasibility of flight under a low-density, high-altitude environment due to leveraging unsteady aerodynamic mechanisms unique to flapping wings. We anticipate our experimental demonstration to be a starting point for more sophisticated flapping wing models and robots for autonomous multi-altitude sensing. Furthermore, it is a preliminary step towards flapping wing flight in the ultra-low density Martian atmosphere.
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This content will become publicly available on March 15, 2026
Deciphering the flapping frequency allometry: unveiling the role of sustained body attitude in the aerodynamic scaling of normal hovering animals
Hovering flight helps facilitate feeding, pollination, and courtship. Observed only in smaller flying animals, hover kinematic characteristics are diverse except for the decreasing flapping frequency with the animal size. Although studies have shown that these wing patterns enable distinct unsteady aerodynamic mechanisms, the role of flapping frequency scaling remains a source of disagreement. Here we show that negative allometry of the flapping frequency is required to sustain body attitude during hovering, consistent with experimental data of hovering animals, from fruit flies to hummingbirds, reported in the literature. The derived scaling model reveals that the lift coefficient and reduced frequency remain invariant with mass, enabling leading-edge vortex formation and wake-capture for a wide range of fliers to hover.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1761618
- PAR ID:
- 10577338
- Publisher / Repository:
- The company of biologists
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Biology Open
- Volume:
- 14
- Issue:
- 3
- ISSN:
- 2046-6390
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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