In a Flap: Experiences with a Bioinspired Flying Robot

Journal article, 2025

While the proliferation of civil drones has led to increasingly diverse designs, research on Human-Drone Interaction (HDI) has largely focused on rotorcraft, but interacting with flapping-wing drones remain underexplored. To address this gap, we present the first study to investigate how humans experience a bioinspired flapping-wing drone compared to a similar-sized quadcopter. We conducted a mixed-methods study (N = 56) using a within-subject 2×2×2 factorial design to examine the effects of drone design, proxemic distance, and human posture on perceptions of safety, pleasure, discomfort, and unexpectedness. Participants had mixed feelings about the bioinspired flapper, finding it newfangled, entertaining, and inspiring, but also unsafe and unclear in its potential use cases. They also associated the flapper with animals ranging from insects to birds to bats. Our findings have important implications for HDI and future bioinspired drone development, including scaling the drone's physical dimensions to its context and purpose, enhancing control and stability, and aligning its form with familiar species archetypes, which in turn should be guided by its context and role.