Artificial butterfly

Hiroto Tanaka of Harvard University and Isao Shimoyama from The University of Tokyo have been studying the flight of swallowtail butterflies. In particular, they hypothesized that because the fore wings of swallowtails overlap their hind wings, the insects rely on simple flapping rather than the more complicated feathering motion used by other insects. To that end, they constructed their own artificial butterfly, shown in the brief video below.