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Animals locomote for various reasons: to search for food, find suitable habitat, pursue prey, escape from predators, or seek a mate. The grand scale of biodiversity contributes to the great locomotory design and mode diversity. Various…

Collective behaviour is a widespread phenomenon in biology, cutting through a huge span of scales, from cell colonies up to bird flocks and fish schools. The most prominent trait of collective behaviour is the emergence of global order:…

Unlike a helicopter, an insect can, in theory, use both lift and drag to stay aloft. Here we show that a dragonfly uses mostly drag to hover by employing asymmetric up and down strokes. Computations of a family of strokes further show that…

Contrary to the stunning feats observed in birds of prey, aerial manipulation and grasping with flying robots still lack versatility and agility. Conventional approaches using rigid manipulators require precise positioning and are subject…

The secret to the spectacular flight capabilities of flapping insects lies in their wings, which are often approximated as flat, rigid plates. Real wings are however delicate structures, composed of veins and membranes, and can undergo…

Zooplankton live in dynamic environments where turbulence may challenge their limited swimming abilities. How this interferes with fundamental behavioral processes remains elusive. We reconstruct simultaneously the trajectories of flow…

This work investigates the impact of position and attitude perturbations on the beamforming performance of multi-satellite systems. The system under analysis is a formation of small satellites equipped with direct radiating arrays that…

The source of the hummingbirds distinctive hum is not well understood, but there are clues to its origin in the acoustic nearfield and farfield. To unravel this mystery, we recorded the acoustic nearfield generated by six freely hovering…

Insect-scale micro-aerial vehicles, especially lightweight, flapping-wing robots, are becoming increasingly important for safe motion sensing in spatially constrained environments such as living spaces. However, yaw control using flapping…

Most animals possess the ability to actuate a vast diversity of movements, ostensibly constrained only by morphology and physics. In practice, however, a frequent assumption in behavioral science is that most of an animal's activities can…

Flapping wings are the primary means by which dragonflies generate forces, but they are susceptible to damage due to their inherent fragility. The damage results in a reduction in wing area and a distortion of the original wing, which in…

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…

Robots are still poor at traversing cluttered large obstacles required for important applications like search and rescue. By contrast, animals are excellent at doing so, often using direct physical interaction with obstacles rather than…

This article presents a new control approach and a dynamic model for engineered flapping flight with many interacting degrees of freedom. This paper explores the applications of neurobiologically inspired control systems in the form of…

In this paper, we present a model describing the collective motion of birds. The model introduces spontaneous changes in direction which are initialized by few agents, here referred as leaders, whose influence act on their nearest…

Avian-informed drones feature morphing wing and tail surfaces, enhancing agility and adaptability in flight. Despite their large potential, realising their full capabilities remains challenging due to the lack of generalized control…

Self-oscillations underlie many natural phenomena such as heartbeat, ocean waves, and the pulsation of variable stars. From pendulum clocks to the behavior of animal groups, self-oscillation is one of the keys to the understanding of…

We study the competition between field-induced transport and trapping in a disordered medium by studying biased random walks on random combs and the bond-diluted Bethe lattice above the percolation threshold. While it is known that the…

Mosquito-borne diseases cause several hundred thousand deaths every year. Deciphering mosquito host-seeking behavior is essential to prevent disease transmission through mosquito capture and surveillance. Despite recent substantial…

Flocking is a paradigmatic example of collective animal behaviour, where decentralized interaction rules give rise to a globally ordered state. In the emergence of order out of self-organization we find similarities between biological…