DragonDrop: passive dynamics and control strategies of aerial righting in the dragonfly

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...