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Dynamic soaring enables sustained flight by extracting energy from wind shear, yet it is commonly understood as a cycle-level maneuver that assumes stable flow conditions. In realistic unsteady environments, however, such assumptions are…

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…

Visual intelligence requires anticipating the future behavior of agents, yet vision systems lack a general representation for motion and behavior. We propose dense point trajectories as visual tokens for behavior, a structured mid-level…

Autonomous fixed-wing flight is becoming a key capability in aerial robotics, enabling sensing, mobility, and contingency operations across both small-scale Uncrewed Aircraft Systems and large-scale Advanced Air Mobility. During unpowered…

Navigation up a sensory gradient is one of the simplest behaviours, and the simplest strategy is run and tumble. But some organisms use other strategies, such as reversing direction or turning by some angle. Here we ask what drives the…

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…

In wildfires, burning pieces of ember-firebrands-are carried downstream by wind. At the time of landing, these firebrands can start secondary fires far away from the main burning unit. This phenomenon is called spotting and the secondary…

Flexible plants, fungi, and sessile animals are thought to reconfigure in the wind and water to reduce the drag forces that act upon them. In strong winds, for example, leaves roll up into cone shapes that reduce flutter and drag when…

To make efficient use of limited physical resources, the brain must match its coding and computational strategies to the statistical structure of input signals. An attractive testing ground for these principles is the problem of motion…

Climate change is a major driver of biodiversity loss, changing the geographic range and abundance of many species. However, there remain significant knowledge gaps about the distribution of species, due principally to the amount of effort…

An understanding of wind speed and direction as a function of height are critical to the proper modeling of atmospheric turbulence. We have used radiosonde data from launch sites near significant astronomical observatories and created mean…

Aerial insects can effortlessly navigate dense vegetation, whereas similarly sized aerial robots typically depend on offboard sensors and computation to maintain stable flight. This disparity restricts insect-scale robots to operation…

This thesis presents a solution that enables aerial robots to reason about surrounding wind flow fields in real time using on board sensors and embedded flight hardware. The core novelty of this research is the fusion of range measurements…

Visual exploration and smart data collection via autonomous vehicles is an attractive topic in various disciplines. Disturbances like wind significantly influence both the power consumption of the flying robots and the performance of the…

The size of a narrow gap traversable by a fixed-wing drone is limited by its wingspan. Inspired by birds, here, we enable the traversal of a gap of sub-wingspan width and height using a morphing-wing drone capable of temporarily sweeping in…

Executing safe and precise flight maneuvers in dynamic high-speed winds is important for the ongoing commoditization of uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs). However, because the relationship between various wind conditions and its effect on…

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) play a crucial role in meteorological research, particularly in environmental wind field measurements. However, several challenges exist in current wind measurement methods using UAVs that need to be…

Insects use visual information to estimate angular velocity of retinal image motion, which determines a variety of flight behaviours including speed regulation, tunnel centring and visual navigation. For angular velocity estimation,…

Monitoring of colonial waterbird nesting islands is essential to tracking waterbird population trends, which are used for evaluating ecosystem health and informing conservation management decisions. Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles, or…

Hybrid unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) integrate the efficient forward flight of fixed-wing and vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) capabilities of multicopter UAVs. This paper presents the modeling, control and simulation of a new type of…