  Stability of flapping flight, a natural requirement for flying insects, is
one of the major challenges for designing micro aerial vehicles (MAVs). To
better understand how a flying insect could stabilize itself during hover, we
have employed a fully coupled computational model, which combines the
Navier-Strokes equations and the equations of motion in six degrees-of-freedom
(NS6DOF) to model the hovering flight of a hawkmoth. These simulations are
combined with high-speed videogrammetry experiments on live, untethered
hawkmoths flying in quiescent and perturbed flows. The flight videos were used
to identify a potential mechanism that could be used by the moth to stabilize
its hovering flight; the effectiveness of this mechanism was investigated using
CFD-based simulations and semi-analytic approximations.
