Dragonfly wing sensors and motion.

What is it about?

Dragonflies are exceptional fliers, thanks in part to their large, highly flexible, and independently controlled wings. This study investigated how dragonflies monitor the shape of their wings during flight using sensors on the wing surface. We found that the wing’s structure naturally limits how it deforms during flight, and that sensors are positioned in the regions that experience the largest strains. This allows dragonflies to use a few well-placed sensors to efficiently encode wing motion through simple timing signals. When the wing is perturbed, additional sensors are recruited, enabling robust and adaptable flight control.

Featured Image

Photo by Timothy Dykes on Unsplash

Photo by Timothy Dykes on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This work describes an example of "morphological computation" – where body design simplifies the sensing and encoding workload of the nervous system. These findings offer inspiration for dynamic engineering and robotics systems. Following this approach, efficiency can be achieved by placing sensors at the most informative locations and using sparse, timing-based signalling, rather than relying on brute-force high-density sensing.