Related papers: Comparing bird and human soaring strategies

Flocks of birds exhibit a remarkable degree of coordination and collective response. It is not just that thousands of individuals fly, on average, in the same direction and at the same speed, but that even the fluctuations around the mean…

Unlike a helicopter, an insect can, in theory, use both lift and drag to stay aloft. Here we show that a dragonfly uses mostly drag to hover by employing asymmetric up and down strokes. Computations of a family of strokes further show that…

Using measured data we demonstrate that there is an amazing correspondence among the statistical properties of spacings between parked cars and the distances between birds perching on a power line. We show that this observation is easily…

Swarming is a conspicuous behavioural trait observed in bird flocks, fish shoals, insect swarms and mammal herds. It is thought to improve collective awareness and offer protection from predators. Many current models involve the hypothesis…

Individuals traversing challenging obstacles are faced with a decision: they can adopt traversal strategies that minimally disrupt their normal locomotion patterns or they can adopt strategies that substantially alter their gait, conferring…

Recent research highlighted the scaling property of human and animal mobility. An interesting issue is that the exponents of scaling law for animals and humans in different situations are quite different. This paper proposes a general…

Robots are used for collecting samples from natural environments to create models of, for example, temperature or algae fields in the ocean. Adaptive informative sampling is a proven technique for this kind of spatial field modeling. This…

Turbulence grounds aircraft and combating it in flight requires energy, yet volant wildlife fly effortlessly even on windy days. The nature of the interactions between soaring birds and transient turbulent gusts is not clear, especially…

Bird flocking is a striking example of collective animal behaviour. A vivid illustration of this phenomenon is provided by the aerial display of vast flocks of starlings gathering at dusk over the roost and swirling with extraordinary…

According to conventional wisdom, a system placed in an environment with a different temperature tends to relax to the temperature of the latter, mediated by the flows of heat and/or matter that are set solely by the temperature difference.…

All swarm-intelligence-based optimization algorithms use some stochastic components to increase the diversity of solutions during the search process. Such randomization is often represented in terms of random walks. However, it is not yet…

Animals that travel together in groups display a variety of fascinating motion patterns thought to be the result of delicate local interactions among group members. Although the most informative way of investigating and interpreting…

We present a Stackelberg game model to investigate how individuals make their decisions on timing and route selection. Group formation can naturally result from these decisions, but only when individuals arrive at the same time and choose…

Cross-country soaring flights rely on intermittent atmospheric updrafts to cover long distances, producing trajectories that alternate between rapid relocation and local exploration. From a large dataset of paraglider, hang glider, and…

Birds exhibit a variety of flight styles, primarily classified as flapping, which is characterized by rapid up-and-down wing movements, and soaring, which involves gliding with wings outstretched. Each species usually performs specific…

Birds in nature perform perching not only for rest but also for interaction with human such as the relationship with falconers. Recently, researchers achieve perching-capable aerial robots as a way to save energy, and deformable structure…

We derive a new method to infer from data the out-of-equilibrium alignment dynamics of collectively moving animal groups, by considering the maximum entropy distribution consistent with temporal and spatial correlations of flight direction.…

Drawing inspiration from flight behavior in biological settings (e.g. territorial battles in dragonflies, and flocking in starlings), this paper demonstrates two strategies for coverage and flocking. Using earlier theoretical studies on…

Human movements are physical processes combining the classical mechanics of the human body moving in space and the biomechanics of the muscles generating the forces acting on the body under sophisticated sensory-motor control. The…

Collective motion of bird flocks can be explained via the hypothesis of many wrongs, and/or, a structured leadership mechanism. In pigeons, previous studies have shown that there is a well-defined hierarchical structure and certain specific…