To study the aerodynamics of flapping flight, Dickinson’s Lab has developed a series of large robots, permitting them to quantify the forces and flows generated by flapping wings.
In designing these robots they make use of the principles of dynamic scaling, in which size, flapping frequency, and velocity of the robots, as well as the viscosity and density of the surrounding fluid, are chosen so that two dimensionless parameters (Reynolds number and reduced frequency) of the devices match those of the animals of interest.
