Related papers: Comparing bird and human soaring strategies
The transportation problem in the plane - how to move a set of objects from one set of points to another set of points in the cheapest way - is a very old problem going back several hundreds of years. In recent years the solution of the…
We investigated the relationships between search efficiency, movement strategy, and non-local communication in the biological context of animal foraging. We considered situations where the members of a population of foragers perform either…
We analyze, from the thermodynamical point of view, mechanical systems in which there is production of mechanical energy due to an internal source of energy, and compare that analysis with the similar one for the "symmetric" motion which…
The levels of agility and flight or swimming performance demonstrated by insects, birds, fish, and even some aquatic invertebrates, are often vastly superior to what even the most advanced human-engineered vehicles operating in the same…
Galloping is a common high-speed gait in both animals and quadrupedal robots, yet its energetic characteristics remain insufficiently explored. This study systematically analyzes a large number of possible galloping gaits by categorizing…
Avian flocks display a wide variety of flight behaviors, including steady directed translation of center of mass, rapid change of overall morphology, re-shuffling of positions of individuals within a persistent form, etc. These behaviors…
This paper solves a path planning problem for a group of gliders. The gliders are tasked with visiting a set of interest points. The gliders have limited range but are able to increase their range by visiting special points called thermals.…
Animals often exhibit changes in their behavior during migration. Telemetry data provide a way to observe geographic position of animals over time, but not necessarily changes in the dynamics of the movement process. Continuous-time models…
Dynamic soaring allows seabirds to harvest mechanical energy from vertical wind shear, but field trajectories lack a benchmark for comparing flight performances across species. We derive a reduced lower bound on transport effort from a…
Numerical models indicate that collective animal behaviour may emerge from simple local rules of interaction among the individuals. However, very little is known about the nature of such interaction, so that models and theories mostly rely…
Thermal cycling is an heuristic optimization algorithm which consists of cyclically heating and quenching by Metropolis and local search procedures, respectively, where the amplitude slowly decreases. In recent years, it has been…
Collective dynamics of many interacting particles have been widely studied because of a wealth of their behavioral patterns quite different from the individual traits. A selective way of birds that reacts to their neighbors is one of the…
Turbulent winds and gusts fluctuate on a wide range of timescales from milliseconds to minutes and longer, a range that overlaps the timescales of avian flight behavior, yet the importance of turbulence to avian behavior is unclear. By…
Insects and birds are often faced by opposing requirements for agile and stable flight. Here, we explore the interplay between aerodynamic effort, maneuverability, and stability in a model system that consists of a $\Lambda$-shaped flyer…
Animal-Human-Machine (AHM) teams are a type of hybrid intelligence system wherein interactions between a human, AI-enabled machine, and animal members can result in unique capabilities greater than the sum of their parts. This paper calls…
The correlated motion of flocks is an instance of global order emerging from local interactions. An essential difference with analogous ferromagnetic systems is that flocks are active: animals move relative to each other, dynamically…
There is evidence that flying animals such as pigeons, goshawks, and bats use optical flow sensing to enable high-speed flight through forest clutter. This paper discusses the elements of a theory of controlled flight through obstacle…
Although human beings have known about the phenomenon of "flocking"- that is, the coherent movement of large numbers of creatures (flocks of birds, schools of fish, herds of woolly mammoths, etc.)- since prehistoric times, it is only in the…
Humans experience small fluctuations in their gait when walking on uneven terrain. The fluctuations deviate from the steady, energy-minimizing pattern for level walking, and have no obvious organization. But humans often look ahead when…
In the event of a total loss of thrust, a pilot must identify a reachable landing site and subsequently execute a forced landing. To do so, they must estimate which region on the ground can be reached safely in gliding flight. We call this…