Related papers: Flying with Abrupt Wing Flapping: Damselfly in Dar…
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…
Bio-inspired methods can provide efficient solutions to perform autonomous landing for Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs). Flying insects such as honeybees perform vertical landings by keeping flow divergence constant. This leads to an exponential…
This paper presents a data-driven optimal control policy for a micro flapping wing unmanned aerial vehicle. First, a set of optimal trajectories are computed off-line based on a geometric formulation of dynamics that captures the nonlinear…
Decoding the direction of translating objects in front of cluttered moving backgrounds, accurately and efficiently, is still a challenging problem. In nature, lightweight and low-powered flying insects apply motion vision to detect a moving…
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…
This project aimed to develop an automated cinematography platform using an unmanned aerial vehicle. Quadcopters are a great platform for shooting aerial scenes but are difficult to maneuver smoothly and can require expertise to pilot. We…
The natural wind environment that volant insects encounter is unsteady and highly complex, posing significant flight control and stability challenges. Unsteady airflows can range from structured chains of discrete vortices shed in the wake…
Autonomous flight of flapping-wing robots is a major challenge for robot perception. Most of the previous sense-and-avoid works have studied the problem of obstacle avoidance for flapping-wing robots considering only static obstacles. This…
We present a data-driven feedforward control to attenuate large transient lift experienced by an airfoil disturbed by an extreme level of discrete vortex gust. The current analysis uses a nonlinear machine-learning technique to compress the…
Collective locomotion of swimming and flying animals is fascinating in terms of individual-level fluid mechanics and group-level structure and dynamics. Here we bridge and relate these scales through a model of formation flight that views…
The design of micro air vehicles (MAVs) introduces aerodynamic performance challenges due to the small size and, consequently, the low Reynolds number 10000-100000. Natural fliers are naturally optimized and are comparable in size to MAVs,…
This is a short introduction illustrating movies submitted to "Fluid Dynamics Videos".
Diffraction gratings are famous for their ability to exhibit, near a Wood anomaly, an arbitrarily large angular dispersion, e.g., with respect to the incidence angle or wavelength. For a diffraction grating under incidence by a plane wave…
We consider the equilibrium behaviour and dynamics of liquid drops on a superhydrophobic surface patterned with sawtooth ridges or posts. Due to the anisotropic geometry of the surface patterning, the contact line can preferentially depin…
In this work, we present an experimental setup and guide to enable the perching of large flapping-wing robots. The combination of forward flight, limited payload, and flight oscillations imposes challenging conditions for localized…
Unmanned aerial-aquatic vehicles (UAAVs) can operate both in the air and underwater, giving them broad application prospects. Inspired by the dual-function wings of puffins, we propose a UAAV with amphibious wings to address the challenge…
Inspired by the observation of intricate and beautifully dynamic patterns generated by food coloring on clean glass slides, we have investigated the behavior of propylene glycol and water droplets on high energy surfaces. In this fluid…
Dynamic soaring is a flying technique to exploit the energy available in wind shear layers, enabling potentially unlimited flight without the need for internal energy sources. We propose a framework for autonomous dynamic soaring with a…
In this study, we present an end-to-end pipeline capable of converting drone-captured video streams into high-fidelity 3D reconstructions with minimal latency. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are extensively used in aerial real-time…
Flying-focus wakefields, which can propagate with a tunable velocity along the optical axis, are promising solutions to electron dephasing in laser-wakefield accelerators. This is accomplished by a combination of spatio-temporal couplings…