Related papers: Comparing bird and human soaring strategies
Thermal soaring saves much energy, but flying large distances in this form represents a great challenge for birds, people and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The solution is to make use of so-called thermals, which are localized, warmer…
Thermal soaring enables birds to perform cost-efficient flights during foraging or migration trips. Yet, although all soaring birds exploit vertical winds effectively, this group contains species that vary strongly in their morphologies.…
Soaring birds gain energy from stable ascending currents or shear. However, it remains unclear whether energy loss due to drag can be overcome by extracting work from transient turbulent fluctuations. We designed numerical simulations of…
Saving energy and enhancing performance are secular preoccupations shared by both nature and human beings. In animal locomotion, flapping flyers or swimmers rely on the flexibility of their wings or body to passively increase their…
Soaring migrants exploit columns of rising air (thermals) to cover large distances with minimal energy. Employing social information while locating thermals may be beneficial, but examining collective movements in wild migrants has been a…
Production of energy (metabolism) and its distribution is vital for living organisms, both at individual level - between different functions of an organism, as well as between species of communities at different organizational levels,…
Fluid dynamics, and flight in particular, is a domain where organisms challenge our understanding of its physics. Integrating the current knowledge of animal flight, we propose to revisit the use of live animals to study physical phenomena.…
Consider a flock of birds that fly interacting between them. The interactions are modelled through a hierarchical system in which each bird, at each time step, adjusts its own velocity according to his past velocity and a weighted mean of…
1. Animal movement patterns contribute to our understanding of variation in breeding success and survival of individuals, and the implications for population dynamics. 2. Over time, sensor technology for measuring movement patterns has…
Why do birds fly in well-defined formations? The observed formations of birds-in-flight are studied with a thermal model. Avian formation-flying is tested as a self-organization process. The maximum entropy production rate (MEPR) postulate…
How should zoomorphic, or bio-inspired, robots indicate to humans that interactions will be safe and fun? Here, a survey is used to measure how human willingness to interact with a simulated butterfly robot is affected by different flight…
Bird migration is an adaptive behavior ultimately aiming at optimizing survival and reproductive success. We propose an optimal switching model to study bird migration, where birds' migration behaviors can be efficiently modeled as…
Flocking is a paradigmatic example of collective animal behaviour, where decentralized interaction rules give rise to a globally ordered state. In the emergence of order out of self-organization we find similarities between biological…
Turbulence is omnipresent in the atmosphere and a long-standing scientific conundrum that makes flight complex. This complexity is little understood; surprisingly, when turbulence arises, air vehicles struggle while birds seem to thrive.…
A widely accepted explanation for robots planning overcautious or overaggressive trajectories alongside human is that the crowd density exceeds a threshold such that all feasible trajectories are considered unsafe -- the freezing robot…
Flapping-wing drones have attracted significant attention due to their biomimetic flight. They are considered more human-friendly due to their characteristics such as low noise and flexible wings, making them suitable for human-drone…
Long arrays of identical, self-propelling flapping flyers are inherently unstable and thus unlikely to exist without active control mechanisms. One approach to enable long in-line formations is to enforce a constant separation between the…
Birds in a flock move in a correlated way, resulting in large polarization of velocities. A good understanding of this collective behavior exists for linear motion of the flock. Yet observing actual birds, the center of mass of the group…
Hovering insects are limited by their physiology and need to rotate their wings at the end of each back and forth motion to keep the wing's leading edge ahead of its trailing edge. The wing rotation at the end of each half-stroke pushes the…
Tail bending associated with maneuvering flight of insects is a known phenomenon although there are only a few studies which analyze and quantify the effects and benefits of body configuration changes. We hypothesized that these…