Muscle wire considerations
The experience I have had with muscle wire was never good.


Massive power consumption
Gets hot
Slow
Doesn't seem to last a long time, maybe stretches.
You can't solder to it.


I once made a butterfly with flapping wings. For that I used simple ammeter coil type actuators. You can buy these from a company called Plantraco Microflight.



If I remember correctly, their resistance is so high that you can actually drive them directly from the pins of a microcontroller.

You can put together a nice butterfly from a couple of these, and a PIC. Don't forget to have some optical fibre antennae, illuminated by LEDs.



And here's a terrible quality video of it moving.