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Ocean sampling for highly temporal phenomena, such as harmful algal blooms, necessitates a vehicle capable of fast aerial travel interspersed with an aquatic means of acquiring in-situ measurements. Vehicle platforms with this capability…
Saving energy and enhancing performance are secular preoccupations shared by both nature and human beings. In animal locomotion, flapping flyers or swimmers rely on the flexibility of their wings or body to passively increase their…
Flexible robots have advantages over rigid robots in their ability to conform physically to their environment and to form a wide variety of shapes. Sensing the force applied by or to flexible robots is useful for both navigation and…
Biologically-inspired robots are a very interesting and difficult branch of robotics dues to its very rich dynamical and morphological complexities. Among them, flying animals, such as bats, have been among the most difficult to take…
Whenever a flapping robot moves along a trajectory it experiences some vibration about its mean path. Even for a hovering case, a flier experiences such vibration due to the oscillatory nature of the aerodynamic forces. In this paper we…
The extraordinary aerial agility of hummingbirds and insects continues to inspire the design of flapping-wing drones. To replicate and analyze such flight, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations that couple flow solvers with rigid…
Bird-sized flapping-wing robots offer significant potential for agile flight in complex environments, but achieving agile and robust trajectory tracking remains a challenge due to the complex aerodynamics and highly nonlinear dynamics…
The autonomous operation of flexible-wing aircraft is technically challenging and has never been presented within literature. The lack of an exact modeling framework is due to the complex nonlinear aerodynamic relationships governed by the…
In vegetated environments, such as forests, exploratory robots play a vital role in navigating complex, cluttered environments where human access is limited and traditional equipment struggles. Visual occlusion from obstacles, such as…
In this work, we present an experimental setup and guide to enable the perching of large flapping-wing robots. The combination of forward flight, limited payload, and flight oscillations imposes challenging conditions for localized…
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…
Hummingbirds and insects achieve outstanding flight performance by adapting their flapping motion to the flight requirements. Their wing kinematics can change from smooth flapping to highly dynamic waveforms, generating unsteady aerodynamic…
Although quadrotors, and aerial robots in general, are inherently active agents, their perceptual capabilities in literature so far have been mostly passive in nature. Researchers and practitioners today use traditional computer vision…
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…
Perception systems for ornithopters face severe challenges. The harsh vibrations and abrupt movements caused during flapping are prone to produce motion blur and strong lighting condition changes. Their strict restrictions in weight, size,…
Achieving short-distance flight helps improve the efficiency of humanoid robots moving in complex environments (e.g., crossing large obstacles or reaching high places) for rapid emergency missions. This study proposes a design of a flying…
Estimating the direction of ambient fluid flow is key for many flying or swimming animals and robots, but can only be accomplished through indirect measurements and active control. Recent work with tethered flying insects indicates that…
This paper introduces a novel compliant mechanism combining lightweight and energy dissipation for aerial physical interaction. Weighting 400~g at take-off, the mechanism is actuated in the forward body direction, enabling precise position…
Achieving both agile maneuverability and high energy efficiency in aerial robots, particularly in dynamic wind environments, remains challenging. Conventional thruster-powered systems offer agility but suffer from high energy consumption,…
In this paper, we take an initial and novel step toward characterizing the physics of the hovering phenomenon in flapping insects and hummingbirds as a new class of extremum seeking (ES) feedback systems. By characterizing hovering flight…