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Insects control unsteady aerodynamic forces on flapping wings to navigate complex environments. While understanding these forces is vital for biology, physics, and engineering, existing evaluation methods face trade-offs: high-fidelity…
When pushing the speed limit for aggressive off-road navigation on uneven terrain, it is inevitable that vehicles may become airborne from time to time. During time-sensitive tasks, being able to fly over challenging terrain can also save…
Airborne wind energy systems aim to generate renewable energy by means of the aerodynamic lift produced by a wing tethered to the ground and controlled to fly crosswind paths. The problem of maximizing the average power developed by the…
Bird migration is an adaptive behavior ultimately aiming at optimizing survival and reproductive success. We propose an optimal switching model to study bird migration, where birds' migration behaviors can be efficiently modeled as…
In marine plankton, many swimming species can perceive their environment with flow sensors. Can they use this flow information to travel faster in turbulence? To address this question, we consider plankters swimming at constant speed, whose…
Using measured data we demonstrate that there is an amazing correspondence among the statistical properties of spacings between parked cars and the distances between birds perching on a power line. We show that this observation is easily…
Realtime model learning proves challenging for complex dynamical systems, such as drones flying in variable wind conditions. Machine learning technique such as deep neural networks have high representation power but is often too slow to…
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 will detail the basis of our previously developed predictive model for pigeon flight paths based on observations of the specific individual being predicted. We will then describe how this model can be adapted to predict the…
Unmanned underwater vehicles are increasingly employed for maintenance and surveying tasks at sea, but their operation in shallow waters is often hindered by hydrodynamic disturbances such as waves, currents, and turbulence. These unsteady…
A study on filtering aspects of airborne wind energy generators is presented. This class of renewable energy systems aims to convert the aerodynamic forces generated by tethered wings, flying in closed paths transverse to the wind flow,…
Utilizing wind hovering techniques of soaring birds can save energy expenditure and improve the flight endurance of micro air vehicles (MAVs). Here, we present a novel method for fully autonomous orographic soaring without a priori…
Inspired by birds flying through cluttered environments such as dense forests, this paper studies the theoretical foundations of a novel motion planning problem: high-speed navigation through a randomly-generated obstacle field when only…
Consider a flock of birds that fly interacting between them. The interactions are modelled through a hierarchical system in which each bird, at each time step, adjusts its own velocity according to his past velocity and a weighted mean of…
Many living organisms can exploit quantum mechanical effects to gain distinct biological advantages. In plants, photosynthesis uses quantum coherence to achieve near 100% efficiency in energy transfer. With advances in experimental…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are finding use in applications that place increasing emphasis on robustness to external disturbances including extreme wind. However, traditional multirotor UAV platforms do not directly sense wind;…
Biological flyers and swimmers navigate in unsteady wake flows using limited sensory abilities and actuation energies. Understanding how vortical structures can be leveraged for energy-efficient navigation in unsteady flows is beneficial in…
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,…
Albatrosses can travel a thousand kilometers daily over the oceans. This feat is achieved through dynamic soaring, a non-flapping flight strategy where propulsive energy is extracted from horizontal wind shears. Dynamic soaring has been…
In this paper, we study the control design of an automatic crosswind stabilization system for a novel, buoyantly-assisted aerial transportation vehicle. This vehicle has several advantages over other aircraft including the ability to…