CAREER: Odor-Guided Flapping Flight: Novel Fluid Dynamic Mechanisms of Insect Navigation

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Insects rely on odor-guided flapping flight to mate and hunt for prey. They navigate by tracking odor trails in complex flow environments to detect and locate distant targets. During this odor-guided navigation, the flapping wings serve for force production and actively draw odor plumes towards the antennae via wing-induced flow. It is hypothesized that the “flapping” used by insects serves the same function as the “sniffing” in mammals for enhancing olfactory detection. Understanding how insects achieve the balance between aerodynamic performance and olfactory sensitivity is the stepping stone towards transforming this feat in engineering solutions for the navigation of miniature aerial vehicles in GPS-denied environments, with important applications for search in natural disasters, chemical leaking monitoring, and drug trafficking detection. To this end, the objective of this project is to establish a physics-driven understanding of the odor-tracking flapping flight in nature. The project also encompasses a variety of education and outreach activities to promote diversity in engineering and strengthen the future STEM workforce.The underlying fluid dynamic principles of olfactory searching in nature remain largely unknown. This project will test the hypothesis that the enhancement of the olfactory sensitivity during navigation can be achieved by regulating the odorant transport in unsteady wing-induced flow through modulating flapping locomotion. A combined high-fidelity computational simulation and theoretical treatment will be used to examine the unsteady flow generated by flapping wings and its associated odorant transport process. The application of a novel computational fluid dynamics-informed simultaneous localization and mapping will be used to explore the odor-tracking algorithms in flying insects. The research will reveal the overarching fluid dynamic mechanisms of odor-guided navigation in nature after the completion of three specific aims: 1) characterize the unsteady aerodynamics and odorant transport in odor-tracking flights; 2) determine the influences of wing-induced unsteady flow on the spatiotemporal distribution of odor plume structures; 3) elucidate the interactions between the unsteady flow and odorant transport during navigation. The findings will advance the development of design principles for bio-inspired flying robots with superior aerodynamic performance and olfactory sensitivity.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.