Quantifying Dragonfly Kinematics During Unsteady Free-Flight Maneuvers

What make dragonflies such interesting fliers are the unsteady high-speed aerial maneuvers they perform. Until recently, the study of dragonflies in mid-flight has been limited to steady-state motions such as hovering and forward flight. In this talk, we report our kinematic analyses of the dragonfly flight recorded in a custom dragonfly arena at HHMI, Janelia Farm. Dragonfly's turning motions often involve all three degrees of freedom about its body axes: yaw, roll, and pitch. We examine the wing kinematics changes associated with different turning maneuvers, and seek the key variables in the wing kinematics that are responsible for each specific maneuver.