Related papers: Lift and wakes of flying snakes
Stretching and retracting wingspan has been widely observed in the flight of birds and bats, and its effects on the aerodynamic performance particularly lift generation are intriguing. The rectangular flat-plate flapping wing with a…
Snake moves across various terrains by bending its elongated body. Recent studies discovered that snakes can use vertical bending to traverse terrain of large height variation, such as horizontally oriented cylinders, a wedge (Jurestovsky,…
Flapping animal flight is often modeled as a combined pitching and heaving motion in order to investigate the unsteady flow structures and resulting forces that could augment the animal's lift and propulsive capabilities. This work isolates…
Many snakes live in deserts, forests, and river valleys and traverse challenging 3-D terrain like rocks, felled trees, and rubble, with obstacles as large as themselves and variable surface properties. By contrast, apart from branch…
We have developed a toy model of flying snake's glide [J.J. Socha, Nature vol. 418 (2002) 603.] by modifying a model for a falling paper. We have found that asymmetric oscillation is a key about why snake can glide. Further investigation…
We optimize three-dimensional snake kinematics for locomotor efficiency. We assume a general space-curve representation of the snake backbone with small-to-moderate lifting off the ground and negligible body inertia. The cost of locomotion…
During the pull-out maneuver, Peregrine falcons were observed to adopt specific flight configurations which are thought to offer an aerodynamic advantage over aerial prey. Analysis of the flight trajectory of a falcon in a controlled…
Terrestrial locomotion requires generating appropriate ground reaction forces which depend on substrate geometry and physical properties. The richness of positions and orientations of terrain features in the 3-D world gives limbless animals…
We develop a model to study the locomotion of snakes on an inclined plane. We determine numerically which snake motions are optimal for two retrograde traveling-wave body shapes---triangular and sinusoidal waves---across a wide range of…
Hummingbirds and insects achieve outstanding flight performance by adapting their flapping motion to the flight requirements. Their wing kinematics can change from smooth flapping to highly dynamic waveforms, generating unsteady aerodynamic…
Snake robots are inspired by the ability of biological snakes to move over rock, grass, leaves, soil, up trees, along pavement and more. Their ability to move in multiple distinct environments is due to their legless locomotion strategy,…
Bioinspired snake robotics has been a highly active area of research over the years and resulted in many prototypes. Much of these prototypes takes the form of serially jointed-rigid bodies. The emergence of soft robotics contributed to a…
Of the vast variety of animal gaits, one of the most striking is the non-planar undulating motion of a sidewinder. But non-planar gaits are not limited to sidewinders. Here we report a new non-planar mode used as an escape strategy in…
Biological flapping wing fliers operate efficiently and robustly in a wide range of flight conditions and are a great source of inspiration to engineers. The unsteady aerodynamics of flapping-wings are dominated by large-scale vortical…
We perform direct numerical simulations of laminar separated flows over finite-aspect-ratio swept wings at a chord-base Reynolds number of $Re = 400$ to reveal a variety of wake structures generated for a range of aspect ratios…
The wing structure of several insects, including dragonflies, is not smooth, but corrugated; its vertical cross-section consists of a connected series of line segments. Some previous studies have reported that corrugated wings exhibit…
Snakes can traverse almost all types of environments by bending their elongate bodies in 3-D to interact with the terrain. Similarly, a snake robot is a promising platform to perform critical tasks in various environments. Understanding how…
Inspired by the wake-surfing nature of animals, this study aims to understand the aerodynamic force variation on a wing surfing in an unsteady 2-D wake. Wind tunnel experiments were conducted using Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) and force…
Diversity and specialization of behavior in insects is unmatched. Insects hop, walk, run, jump, row, swim, glide and fly to propel themselves in a variety of environments. We have uncovered an unusual mode of propulsion of aerodynamic…
The large active wing deformation is a significant way to generate high aerodynamic forces required in bat flapping flight. Besides the twisting, the elementary morphing models of a bat wing are proposed, such as wing-bending in the…