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

by Hoon Cheol Park, Hoang-Vu Phan

Overview

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 aerodynamic forces using the unsteady blade element theory (UBET) and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with commercial software ANSYS Fluent.

Features:

• Describe 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781032996400
Publisher:	CRC Press
Publication date:	11/21/2025
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Hoon Cheol Park received his BS (1985) and MS (1987) degrees from Seoul National University, Seoul, Korea, and his Ph.D. 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 Smart Vehicle 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 Ph.D. research focused on the finite element method, and his recent research interests are primarily in biomimetics and bio-inspired 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 and Biomimetics in 2019. He also served as 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 M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in biomimetics and intelligent microsystems from Konkuk University, Seoul, South Korea in 2012 and 2017, respectively, and B.E. 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 a senior postdoctoral scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland and will begin his position as an Assistant Professor in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Nevada, Reno, USA, in October 2025. Prior to joining EPFL, he was a non-tenure-track Assistant Professor at 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 also 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.

Table of Contents

1. Overview

2. Design and fabrication

3. Measurements

4. Prediction of aerodynamic forces

5. System integration and controlled flight

6. Flying like a beetle

7. Toward flapping flight on Mars

8. Concluding remarks

Appendix