Related papers: Comparing bird and human soaring strategies

Animal swarms displaying a variety of typical flocking patterns would not exist without underlying safe, optimal and stable dynamics of the individuals. The emergence of these universal patterns can be efficiently reconstructed with…

The thermoregulation system in animals removes body heat in hot temperatures and retains body heat in cold temperatures. The better the animal removes heat, the worse the animal retains heat and visa versa. It is the balance between these…

Autonomous unpowered flight is a challenge for control and guidance systems: all the energy the aircraft might use during flight has to be harvested directly from the atmosphere. We investigate the design of an algorithm that optimizes the…

Birds employ rapid pitch-up motions for different purposes: perching birds use this motion to decelerate and come to a complete stop while hunting birds, like bald eagles, employ it to catch prey and swiftly fly away. Motivated by these…

Robot multimodal locomotion encompasses the ability to transition between walking and flying, representing a significant challenge in robotics. This work presents an approach that enables automatic smooth transitions between legged and…

The albatross optimized flight maneuver -- known as dynamic soaring -- is nothing but a wonder of biology, physics, and engineering. By utilizing dynamic soaring, the bird can travel in the desired flight direction almost for free by…

Flapping-wing insects, birds, and robots are thought to offset the high power cost of oscillatory wing motion by using elastic elements for energy storage and return. Insects possess highly resilient elastic regions in their flight anatomy…

Mutual adaptation can significantly enhance overall task performance in human-robot co-transportation by integrating both the robot's and human's understanding of the environment. While human modeling helps capture humans' subjective…

Collective motion is abundant in nature, producing a vast amount of phenomena which have been studied in recent years, including the landing of flocks of birds. We investigate the collective decision making scenario where a flock of birds…

Modelling realistic human behaviours in simulation is an ongoing challenge that resides between several fields like social sciences, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. Human movement is a special type of behaviour driven by intent…

Most skydiving accidents occur during the parafoil-piloting and landing stages and result from human lapses in judgment while piloting the parafoil. Training of novice pilots is protracted due to the lack of functional and easily accessible…

We bound the time it takes for a group of birds to reach steady state in a standard flocking model. We prove that (i) within single exponential time fragmentation ceases and each bird settles on a fixed flying direction; (ii) the flocking…

Recent empirical studies found different thermodynamic phases for collective motion in animals. However, such a thermodynamic description for human movement remains unclear, mainly due to the limited resolution of existing tracking…

It is well-known that proper scaling can increase the efficiency of computational problems. In this paper we define and show that a balancing technique can substantially improve the computational efficiency of optimal control algorithms. We…

For centuries, soaring birds -- such as albatrosses and eagles -- have been mysterious and intriguing for biologists, physicists, aeronautical/control engineers, and applied mathematicians. These fascinating biological organisms have the…

Combining new, low-cost thermal infrared and time-of-flight range sensors provides new opportunities. In this position paper we explore the possibilities of combining these sensors and using their fused data for person detection. The…

Nature-inspired algorithms are among the most powerful algorithms for optimization. This paper intends to provide a detailed description of a new Firefly Algorithm (FA) for multimodal optimization applications. We will compare the proposed…

The aerial flocking of birds, or murmurations, has fascinated observers while presenting many challenges to behavioral study and simulation. We examine how the periphery of murmurations remain well bounded and cohesive. We also investigate…

Increasing nature-inspired metaheuristic algorithms are applied to solving the real-world optimization problems, as they have some advantages over the classical methods of numerical optimization. This paper has proposed a new…

In this letter, we reveal a universal, very simple extremum seeking natural feedback law and mechanism that governs, adapts, and generates in real-time, optimized lift variations for successful energy gain flight in presence of wind shear.…