Abstract: Flight organisms typically exhibit distinct motion characteristics in various modes of movement and habitats, such as autonomous takeoff and landing, gliding, and rapid maneuvering. These multimodal locomotion capabilities significantly enhance their adaptability and survival in different environments, offering valuable insights for the cur-rent design of flapping-wing aircraft. This paper reviews certain biologically significant multimodal locomotion mechanisms in insects and birds, along with content relevant to the engineering design of flapping-wing aircraft. It provides an overview of the design features of flapping-wing aircraft equipped with multimodal locomotion capabil-ities and conducts an analysis and summary of the development status and key issues related to relevant technol-ogies. Finally, based on the biological mechanisms of insects and birds and the current state of flapping-wing air-craft development, it elucidates the critical challenges that flapping-wing aircraft face in the realm of multimodal design and anticipates the directions that require focused research in the future.

Key words: multimodal kinematic mechanism, flapping wing vehicles, multimodal design technology, autonomous take-off and landing, flutter-slip combination, fly-climb integration