10.5061/DRYAD.34TMPG4J7
Fabian, Sam
0000-0002-0366-7236
Imperial College London
Zhou, Rui
Imperial College London
Lin, Huai-Ti
Imperial College London
DragonDrop: passive dynamics and control strategies of aerial righting in
the dragonfly
Dryad
dataset
2020
Passive stability
Behavioural strategy
flight control
motion capture
dragonfly
2021-01-14T00:00:00Z
2021-01-14T00:00:00Z
en
181958671 bytes
2
CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication
Dragonflies perform dramatic aerial manoeuvres when hunting prey or
chasing rivals but glide leisurely with wings virtually fixed. This makes
dragonflies a great system to explore how to minimize the trade-off
between manoeuvrability and stability. We challenged the dragonfly by
dropping it from selected inverted attitudes and digitised the
6-degrees-of-freedom aerial recovery kinematics via custom motion capture
techniques. From these kinematic data we then performed rigid-body inverse
dynamics to reconstruct the forces and torques involved in the righting
behaviour. We found that inverted dragonflies typically recover themselves
with the shortest rotation from the initial body inclination.
Additionally, they exhibited a strong tendency to pitch up with their head
leading out of the manoeuvre. Surprisingly, anaesthetised dragonflies
could also complete the aerial righting. Such passive righting disappears
in recently dead dragonflies but can be partially recovered by waxing
their wings to mimic the wing posture of the anesthetised dragonflies. Our
inverse dynamics model and wind tunnel experiments support the idea that
certain wing postures readily provide stability and may explain the
dragonfly’s rotational preference. This work demonstrates for the first
time that aerodynamically stable body configuration exists in gliding
insects, and an active insect can leverage this passive stability as
needed.
This kinematic data has been collected using 8 motion capture cameras
tracking a variable number (generally 5) of markers. Dragonflies were
dropped from selected inverted orientations as detailed in the paper
itself and a ReadMe file has been provided with the data to facilitate
navigation through the many kinematic parameters being measured. All data
have gone through extensive processing, however raw captured coordinates
are also included within the files.
The Readme file entitled "Fabian_et_al_DragonDrop_README.txt" is
enclosed with the data and should give the relevant information required
to access and assess the data.