Related papers: Optimized Body Deformation in Dragonfly Maneuvers
Terrestrial animals and robots are susceptible to flipping-over during rapid locomotion in complex terrains. However, small robots are less capable of self-righting from an upside-down orientation compared to small animals like insects.…
Aerial insects exhibit highly agile maneuvers such as sharp braking, saccades, and body flips under disturbance. In contrast, insect-scale aerial robots are limited to tracking non-aggressive trajectories with small body acceleration. This…
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…
The aerial environment in the operating domain of small-scale natural and artificial flapping wing fliers is highly complex, unsteady and generally turbulent. Considering flapping flight in an unsteady wind environment with a periodically…
Wing flexibility governs the flying performance of flapping wing flyers. Here, we use a self-propelled flapping-wing model mounted on a ``merry go round'' to investigate the effect of wing compliance on the propulsive efficiency of the…
Flying insects can perform rapid, sophisticated maneuvers like backflips, sharp banked turns, and in-flight collision recovery. To emulate these in aerial robots weighing less than a gram, known as flying insect robots (FIRs), a fast and…
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.…
The wings in different insect species are morphologically distinct with regards to their size, outer contour (margin) shape, venation, and pigmentation. The basis of the diversity of wing margin shapes remains unknown, despite the fact that…
This study investigates the influence of aerofoil shape optimisation on blade aerodynamic performance under curvilinear and unsteady kinematics characteristic of vertical-axis turbines and cycloidal propellers. Using a cyclorotor in hover…
Fish typically swim by periodic bending of their bodies. Bending seems to follow a universal rule; it occurs at about one-third from the posterior end of the fish body with a maximum bending angle of about $30^o$. However, the hydrodynamic…
This research endeavors to design the perching maneuver and control in ornithopter robots. By analyzing the dynamic interplay between the robot's flight dynamics, feedback loops, and the environmental constraints, we aim to advance our…
Minimising the energy consumption associated with periodic motion is a priority common to a wide range of technologies and organisms - among them, many species of flying insect, for which flapping-wing flight is a life-essential mode of…
Stability of flapping flight, a natural requirement for flying insects, is one of the major challenges for designing micro aerial vehicles (MAVs). To better understand how a flying insect could stabilize itself during hover, we have…
Abdominal Undulation with Compliant Mechanism Improves Flight Performance of Biomimetic Robotic ButterflThis paper presents the design, modeling, and experimental validation of a biomimetic robotic butterfly (BRB) that integrates a…
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…
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…
We present a deep reinforcement learning approach to a classical problem in fluid dynamics, i.e., the reduction of the drag of a bluff body. We cast the problem as a discrete-time control with continuous action space: at each time step, an…
Collective patterns of motion emerge across biological taxa: insects swarm, fish school, and birds flock. In particular, large migratory birds form strikingly ordered V-shaped formations, which experiments and direct numerical simulations…
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…
Dragonfly beats its wings independently, resulting in its superior maneuverability. Depending on the magnitude of phase difference between the fore- and hind-wings of dragonfly, the vortical structures and their interaction with wings…