Related papers: Bees with attitude: the effect of gusts on flight …
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…
Flying animals resort to fast, large-degree-of-freedom motion of flapping wings, a key feature that distinguishes them from rotary or fixed-winged robotic fliers with limited motion of aerodynamic surfaces. However, flapping-wing…
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…
Flapping insect flight is a complex and beautiful phenomenon that relies on fast, active control mechanisms to counter aerodynamic instability. To directly investigate how freely-flying D. melanogaster control their body pitch angle against…
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…
There is evidence that flying animals such as pigeons, goshawks, and bats use optical flow sensing to enable high-speed flight through forest clutter. This paper discusses the elements of a theory of controlled flight through obstacle…
Tracking a turbulent plume to locate its source is a complex control problem because it requires multi-sensory integration and must be robust to intermittent odors, changing wind direction, and variable plume statistics. This task is…
Stationary take-off, without a running start or elevated descent, requires substantial aerodynamic forces to overcome weight, particularly for large birds such as geese exceeding 2 kg. However, the complex wing motion and…
The capacity for aerial maneuvering shaped the evolution of flying animals. Here we evaluate consequences of aviaian morphology for aerial performance (1,2) by quantifying static stability and control effectiveness of physical models (3)…
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…
Natural fliers like bats exploit the complex fluid-structure interaction between their flexible membrane wings and the air with great ease. Yet, replicating and scaling the balance between the structural and fluid-dynamical parameters of…
Due to aerodynamic instabilities, stabilizing flapping flight requires ever-present fast corrective actions. Here we investigate how flies control body roll angle, their most susceptible degree of freedom. We glue a magnet to each fly,…
Biological studies show that hummingbirds can perform extreme aerobatic maneuvers during fast escape. Given a sudden looming visual stimulus at hover, a hummingbird initiates a fast backward translation coupled with a 180-degree yaw turn,…
This work briefly covers our efforts to stabilize the flight dynamics of Northeastern's tailless bat-inspired micro aerial vehicle, Aerobat. Flapping robots are not new. A plethora of examples is mainly dominated by insect-style design…
This study delves into the flight behaviors of Budgerigars (Melopsittacus undulatus) to gain insights into their flight trajectories and movements. Using 3D reconstruction from stereo video camera recordings, we closely examine the velocity…
This study investigates the effects of porosity on flying creatures such as dragonflies, moths, hummingbirds, etc. wing and shows that pores can affect wing performance. These studies were performed by 3D porous flapping wing flow analyses…
A complete, self-contained mathematical framework for modelling the coupled aeroelastic and flight dynamic behaviour of free-flying flexible aircraft subject to atmospheric gust encounters is presented. The framework integrates three…
Airborne insects generate a leading edge vortex when they flap their wings. This coherent vortex is a low pressure region that enhances the lift of flapping wings compared to fixed wings. Insect wings are thin membranes strengthened by a…
Many elastic structures have two possible equilibrium states: from umbrellas that become inverted in a sudden gust of wind, to nano-electromechanical switches, origami patterns and the hopper popper, which jumps after being turned…
Aggregation is a common behavior by which groups of organisms arrange into cohesive groups. Whether suspended in the air (like honey bee clusters), built on the ground (such as army ant bridges), or immersed in water (such as sludge worm…