At the edge of two worlds — one thin with Martian silence, the other buzzing with insect wings — researchers at Tokyo Metropolitan University have found a common question: what shape allows flight when air itself barely cooperates? By turning to evolutionary algorithms and the ancient geometry of insect wings, Professor Masahiro Kanazaki's team has begun to answer it, mapping the precise corrugations and curves that let a wing either slip through near-nothing or push against it with purpose. Their work is narrow by design, but it opens toward something vast — drones that could one day explore
Tokyo researchers optimize ultra-thin wings for Mars drones using bio-inspired design
Corrugations near the leading edge create rolls of air that reduce friction
Mark
So they're using algorithms to design better drone wings. Why does it matter that they're looking at insect wings specifically?
Mimi
Because insects already solve the problem we're trying to solve. They fly in thin air—from a physics perspective, the air around a mosquito behaves almost like the Martian atmosphere. Their wings are ultra-thin and lightweight, which is exactly what you need if you're sending a drone to another planet.
Luke
But insects can deform their wings. The paper says that explicitly. So how much of what they learned actually applies to a rigid drone wing?
Mimi
That's the limitation, yes. But the researchers are saying that if you understand both corrugated designs and cambered designs separately, you might be able to combine them in a 3D structure that approximates what insects do naturally.
Mark
What did they actually discover? What's the concrete finding?
Mimi
Two things. Wings designed to reduce drag had corrugations near the leading edge—those ridges create little air rolls that cut friction. Wings designed to maximize lift had almost no corrugations, just a convex curve with some concave dips at the back.
Luke
And they found this using a "zero-thickness" model, which doesn't exist in reality. How much does that simplification change the answer?
Mimi
It's a fair question. The zero-thickness model lets them isolate the effect of corrugation pattern alone, without the confounding effects of how thick the leading edge is or what shape it has. But you're right—real wings have thickness, and that will matter.
Mark
So what comes next? Are they building actual wings?
Mimi
The paper doesn't say they've built prototypes. They're saying their findings should guide UAV miniaturization and wing design for thin atmospheres. It's a design principle, not a finished product.
Luke
And the scope is pretty narrow—they're looking at 2D airfoil cross-sections, not full 3D wings. That's important to note.
Mimi
Absolutely. But it's a necessary step. You have to understand the cross-section before you can design the full wing.
Mark
When might we actually see a Mars drone with wings like this?
Mimi
That's beyond what the research tells us. This is foundational work. It could inform designs for drones that fly in thin atmospheres, but there's a long path from algorithm to actual hardware.
Der Puls
- Mars's atmosphere is roughly one percent as dense as Earth's, making every conventional wing design developed over a century of aviation essentially useless there.
- The same low-Reynolds number physics that governs a dragonfly's membrane wings also governs what a Mars drone would need — nature has already solved a version of this problem, and researchers are reverse-engineering it.
- An evolutionary algorithm tested thousands of simulated wing shapes, iterating like natural selection toward two competing goals: minimum drag and maximum lift, which pulled designs in sharply opposite directions.
- Leading-edge corrugations beat flat surfaces at reducing friction, while convex, dome-like shapes with trailing concavities proved superior for generating lift — two strategies, two different wings.
- The findings are two-dimensional and conditional, but they lay groundwork for three-dimensional wing structures that could adapt across environments, from Earth's dense air to the gossamer skies of Mars.
At the edge of two worlds — one thin with Martian silence, the other buzzing with insect wings — researchers at Tokyo Metropolitan University have found a common question: what shape allows flight when air itself barely cooperates? By turning to evolutionary algorithms and the ancient geometry of insect wings, Professor Masahiro Kanazaki's team has begun to answer it, mapping the precise corrugations and curves that let a wing either slip through near-nothing or push against it with purpose. Their work is narrow by design, but it opens toward something vast — drones that could one day explore other planets, or shrink to the scale of living things, carrying human curiosity into places no hand could reach.
A team at Tokyo Metropolitan University has spent years pursuing a deceptively practical question: how do you build a wing when the air around it barely pushes back?
On Earth, wings are engineered for dense atmosphere — thick air that rewards curved surfaces and forgives imperfect shapes. Mars offers none of that. With an atmosphere roughly one percent as dense as Earth's, the physics of flight there belong to a different regime entirely, one engineers call low-Reynolds number flight, where air's stickiness matters far more than its mass. Conventional wing designs simply fail in those conditions.
But insects don't. Dragonflies and mosquitoes operate under the same thin-air physics a Mars drone would face, which led Professor Masahiro Kanazaki's team to look at nature for guidance. Insect wings are ultra-thin, membrane-like, and proven across hundreds of millions of years of evolution. The question was whether their geometry could be decoded and applied.
The team ran an evolutionary algorithm through thousands of simulated wing shapes, scoring each for either drag reduction or lift maximization, then iterating toward better solutions. To isolate the effect of corrugation — the ridges and valleys characteristic of insect wings — they used a zero-thickness model, stripping away physical bulk to see what shape alone could accomplish.
The results were clear and somewhat surprising. Wings optimized for minimum drag clustered their corrugations near the leading edge, where they generated small air rolls that actually reduced friction below that of a flat surface. Wings optimized for lift looked almost nothing like them — smooth, convex overall, with concave dips near the trailing edge. The two objectives pulled design in opposite directions, as if drag and lift speak different geometric languages.
Insects resolve this tension by deforming their wings mid-flight, shifting between corrugated and cambered shapes as conditions demand. The Tokyo team believes understanding both strategies separately is the first step toward combining them in three-dimensional structures capable of performing across radically different environments — from Mars's near-vacuum skies to Earth's dense lower atmosphere, from bird-sized drones to machines no larger than a fingernail.
The findings describe two-dimensional cross-sections under specific conditions, but they point toward something larger: as space agencies plan more ambitious planetary missions and drone technology continues to miniaturize, the ability to design wings for extreme conditions moves from theoretical exercise to practical necessity.
A team at Tokyo Metropolitan University has spent the last several years chasing a problem that sounds abstract until you consider where it leads: how do you build a wing that actually works when the air around it is so thin it barely pushes back?
On Earth, aircraft wings are designed around the physics of dense air. The thicker the atmosphere, the more lift you get from a curved surface moving through it, and the easier it is to overcome drag. But Mars presents a fundamentally different challenge. The Martian atmosphere is roughly one percent as dense as Earth's, which means the traditional wing shapes that work here become nearly useless there. Any drone sent to explore Mars needs wings built from the ground up for an entirely different set of physical rules—what engineers call low-Reynolds number flight, where the stickiness of air matters far more than its weight.
The same physics governs something else: insects. A mosquito or a dragonfly operates in the same low-Reynolds number regime as a Mars drone would, which is why Professor Masahiro Kanazaki and his team at Tokyo Metropolitan University decided to look at nature for clues. Insects have ultra-thin, membrane-like wings—lightweight, flexible, and proven to work in thin-air conditions. If researchers could figure out what makes those wings efficient, they might be able to design better drones not just for Mars, but for miniaturized aircraft on Earth as well.
The team used an evolutionary algorithm to explore thousands of possible wing designs. The algorithm ran aerodynamic simulations on different shapes, scored them based on whether they minimized drag or maximized lift, then tweaked the designs and ran them again, iterating toward better solutions. To isolate the effect of wing corrugation—those ridges and valleys you see on insect wings—they used what's called a "zero-thickness" model. In the real world, a wing has thickness; its leading edge has a certain shape and bulk. But in simulation, they could strip all that away and see what the corrugation pattern alone could accomplish.
What they found was striking. Wings designed to minimize drag showed a specific pattern: corrugations clustered near the leading edge created tiny rolls of air that reduced friction as the wing moved through the fluid. These designs actually produced less drag than a flat sheet. Wings optimized for lift, by contrast, had almost no corrugations at all. Instead, they featured an overall convex curve—like a dome—with concave dips near the trailing edge. The two objectives pulled the design in opposite directions, which makes sense: a wing that cuts through air with minimal resistance looks nothing like a wing that wants to push air downward and generate upward force.
Insects, of course, can do something humans cannot easily replicate in a rigid machine: they deform their wings. A dragonfly can shift from a corrugated shape to a cambered one mid-flight, adapting to different speeds and conditions. The Tokyo team believes that understanding both design strategies separately opens a path toward combining them in three-dimensional wing structures that could perform well across a range of environments. That's the real prize—a wing that works whether a drone is flying through Mars's gossamer atmosphere or navigating the dense air near Earth's surface, or whether it's the size of a bird or the size of a fingernail.
The findings are narrow in scope—they describe optimal shapes for two-dimensional airfoil cross-sections under specific conditions—but they point toward something larger. As drone technology miniaturizes and as space agencies plan more ambitious robotic missions to other worlds, the ability to design wings that work in extreme conditions becomes a practical necessity. These simulations, run on Japan's high-performance computing infrastructure, represent one small step toward making those missions possible.
Bemerkenswerte Zitate
Lightweight membrane-like wings are a strong contender for use in unmanned aerial vehicles in thin atmospheres, like on Mars, and in UAV miniaturization— Tokyo Metropolitan University research team
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