Highlights•The principles of natural flight have inspired scientists to create robotic
counterparts.•Highly efficient drones can be built by closely mimicking insect flight.•A future
research direction in robotics is the multimodal and multifunctional bio-inspired flying
robot.Insects have attracted much interest from scientists and engineers as they offer an
endless source of inspiration for creating innovative engineering designs. By mimicking
flying insects, it may be possible to create highly efficient biomimetic drones. In this paper …