Pioneering work on flapping-wing aerodynamics was done by Lighthill (1969) and Weis-Fogh (1973). Recent works, both in experiments and simulations, were documented by Katz (1979), Ellington (1984a), DeLaurier (1993), Smith (1996), Vest and Katz (1996), Liu and Kawachi (1998), Dickinson et al. (1999), Jones and Platzer (1999, 2003), Wang (2000), and Chasman and Chakravarthy (2001). A review of the characteristics of both flapping wings and fixed wings was given by Shyy et al. (1999a). The spectrum of animal flight with flapping wing was presented by Templin (2000). Ho et al. (2003) further reviewed the recent effort in developing flapping-wing-based MAVs. Computational and experimental studies regarding rotating-wing MAVs were made by Bohorquez et al. (2003).

The quasi-steady theory is constructed based on the instantaneous velocity, wing geometry, and AoA when the steady-state aerodynamic model is used.