LEONARDO DA VINCI’S 15th-century vision of mechanical flight apparently never included fixed wings assisted by propellers or jet engines. His chief inspiration was birds, reflected in drawings of a flying machine fashioned to stay aloft by flapping its wings.

More than 500 years later, WowWee, a robotics and entertainment products company, shares that vision. Next month, it plans to release a mass-produced, functional ornithopter, a device that flies in birdlike fashion — in this case, a radio-controlled toy that mechanically flaps its Mylar wings.

The inspiration — besides Leonardo’s work — is an insect, said Sean Frawley, the 22-year-old inventor of the toy, the FlyTech Dragonfly.

“People have been experimenting all around the world with these kinds of things,” Mr. Frawley, an aerospace engineering graduate of Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona Beach, Fla., and project manager for WowWee, said in a telephone interview from the company’s office in Hong Kong.