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While engineers put lots of effort, resources, and time in building insect scale micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) that fly like insects, insects themselves are the real masters of flight. What if we would use living insect as platform for MAV…
The smallest flying insects often have bristled wings resembling feathers or combs. We combined experiments and three-dimensional numerical simulations to investigate the trade-off between wing weight and drag generation. In experiments of…
In this paper, we present a full dynamical model of a four-winged micro ornithopter inspired by a dragonfly-type insect. The micro ornithopter is modeled as four articulated rigid body components (wings) connected to the main body via…
Two configurations typical of fixed-wing aircraft are simulated with the actuator line method (ALM): a wing with winglets and a T-tail. The ALM is extensively used in rotor simulations to model the blades by body forces, which are…
This study aims to investigate the effects of electroactive morphing on a 70cm chord A320 wing by means of near trailing edge slight deformation and vibration. Wing morphing is performed by Macro Fiber Composites (MFC) mini-piezoelectric…
There has been a controversy as to whether or not the non-pathological flat foot and high-arched foot have an effect on human walking activities. The 3D foot scanning system was employed to obtain static footprints from subjects adopting a…
We report on experimental and numerical studies aimed at developing an improved paradigm to model animal flight at moderate Reynolds numbers ($ 20 k - 50k $). A series of experiments were performed to characterize the behaviors of…
We present a numerical study to characterize nonlinear unsteady aeroelastic interactions of two-dimensional flexible wings at high angles of attack. The coupled fluid-flexible wing system is solved by a body-fitted variational aeroelastic…
In order to examine the influence of system dynamics on sliding friction, we introduce the so-called micro-walking machine. This model consists of a rigid body with a number of elastic contact spots that is pulled by a constantly moving…
This paper presents a dynamic model and a control system for a flapping-wing unmanned aerial vehicle. Inspired by flight characteristics captured from live Monarch butterflies, a new dynamic model is presented to account the effects of…
The autonomous operation of flexible-wing aircraft is technically challenging and has never been presented within literature. The lack of an exact modeling framework is due to the complex nonlinear aerodynamic relationships governed by the…
Morphing aerial vehicles offer enhanced maneuverability and fuel efficiency compared to fixed-wing configurations. However, the trade-off between performance gains and control cost in dynamic, unsteady maneuvers remains under-explored. This…
Jumping take-off in birds is an explosive behaviour with the goal of providing a rapid transition from ground to airborne locomotion. An effective jump is predicated on the need to maintain dynamic stability through the acceleration phase.…
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…
Flying animals, such as bats, fly through their fluidic environment as they create air jets and form wake structures downstream of their flight path. Bats, in particular, dynamically morph their highly flexible and dexterous armwing to…
Drone-based rapid and accurate environmental edge detection is highly advantageous for tasks such as disaster relief and autonomous navigation. Current methods, using radars or cameras, raise deployment costs and burden lightweight drones…
Existing research has yet to reach a consensus on whether and how small flying animals utilize elastic energy storage mechanisms to reduce flight energy expenditure, and there is a lack of systematic and universal methods for assessment. To…
We present a design of a bird-inspired morphing wing aircraft, including bionic research, modeling, simulation and flight experiments. Inspired by birds and activated by a planar linkage, our proposed aircraft has three key states: gliding,…
We discuss the problem of designing and implementing controllers for insect-scale flapping-wing micro air vehicles (FWMAVs), from a unifying perspective and employing two different experimental platforms; namely, a Harvard RoboBee-like…
The present work is concerned with the shape optimization of flapping wings in forward flight. The analysis is performed by combining a gradient-based optimizer with the unsteady vortex lattice method (UVLM). We describe the UVLM…