Kinematics, Power, and Optimization in Hovering Insect Flight

Insects are graceful and varied locomotors -- flying, darting, and hovering with remarkable ease. But are they efficient? By determining the forces acting on a wing for a prescribed motion via a quasi-steady model of fluid forces on a thin plate, we run optimization algorithms to find the optimal wing motion that an insect can make. A common belief is that animals move in a way that minimizes their metabolic cost. We test this hypothesis by comparing the results of our optimization with empirically measured data.