Dear Colleagues,

Micro air vehicles (MAV) is an emerging research field that has been rapidly growing during the last decade. Typically, there are three types of MAVs: fixed-wing MAVs, rotary-wing or multi-copter MAVs and flapping-wing MAVs (FW-MAVs). The insect-inspired, tailless, hover-capable FW-MAVs, is without control surfaces at the tail, unlike the bird-like FW-MAV, where both flight force and control torque are produced only by flapping wings. Therefore, the FW-MAV must be able to modulate the wing kinematics of each wing so that asymmetric aerodynamic force can be produced. Thus, its engineering design, underlying aerodynamics and feedback control are all very challenging. Moreover, for the next few years, a freely flying insect-scale FW-MAV will remain a challenging topic. Meanwhile, larger-scale motor-driven FW-MAVs have demonstrated a great achievement in agile flight ability, showing their potential readiness for useful applications. However, they still need improvements in flight endurance to show their merits over similar-size conventional rotorcrafts, which are already predominant in the market. Scholars conducting research on FW-MAVs may thus need to focus more on the following specific research, including topics such as thrust enhancement, efficiency, gust/side wing response, noise reduction and agile maneuverability to avoid obstacles. This Special Issue covers these areas and focuses on the flapping-wing MAV mechanism, control and applications.

Dr. Gih Keong Lau
Prof. Dr. Zhenbo Lu
Dr. Yao-Wei Chin
Guest Editors

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• micro air vehicle (MAV)
• flapping-wing MAVs
• insect-inspired
• tailless
• hover-capable