Related papers: Learning Extreme Hummingbird Maneuvers on Flapping…

Insects and hummingbirds exhibit extraordinary flight capabilities and can simultaneously master seemingly conflicting goals: stable hovering and aggressive maneuvering, unmatched by small scale man-made vehicles. Flapping Wing Micro Air…

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…

Aerial insects exhibit highly agile maneuvers such as sharp braking, saccades, and body flips under disturbance. In contrast, insect-scale aerial robots are limited to tracking non-aggressive trajectories with small body acceleration. This…

Flying insects can perform rapid, sophisticated maneuvers like backflips, sharp banked turns, and in-flight collision recovery. To emulate these in aerial robots weighing less than a gram, known as flying insect robots (FIRs), a fast and…

Controlling the flight of flapping-wing drones requires versatile controllers that handle their time-varying, nonlinear, and underactuated dynamics from incomplete and noisy sensor data. Model-based methods struggle with accurate modeling,…

Wings of flying animals can not only generate lift and control torques but also can sense their surroundings. Such dual functions of sensing and actuation coupled in one element are particularly useful for small sized bio-inspired robotic…

In systems control, the dynamics of a system are governed by modulating its inputs to achieve a desired outcome. For example, to control the thrust of a quad-copter propeller the controller modulates its rotation rate, relying on a…

This paper presents a data-driven optimal control policy for a micro flapping wing unmanned aerial vehicle. First, a set of optimal trajectories are computed off-line based on a geometric formulation of dynamics that captures the nonlinear…

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…

Flapping wing flight is a challenging dynamical problem and is also a very fascinating subject to study in the field of biomimetic robotics. A Bat, in particular, has a very articulated armwing mechanism with high degrees-of-freedom and…

Inverted landing in a rapid and robust manner is a challenging feat for aerial robots, especially while depending entirely on onboard sensing and computation. In spite of this, this feat is routinely performed by biological fliers such as…

Bats' dynamic morphing wings are known to be extremely high-dimensional, and they employ the combination of inertial dynamics and aerodynamics manipulations to showcase extremely agile maneuvers. Bats heavily rely on their highly flexible…

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…

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…

Can we enable humanoid robots to generate rich, diverse, and expressive motions in the real world? We propose to learn a whole-body control policy on a human-sized robot to mimic human motions as realistic as possible. To train such a…

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…

Insects excel in trajectory and attitude handling during flight, yet the specific kinematic behaviours they use for maintaining stability in air disturbances are not fully understood. This study investigates the adaptive strategies of…

This research endeavors to design the perching maneuver and control in ornithopter robots. By analyzing the dynamic interplay between the robot's flight dynamics, feedback loops, and the environmental constraints, we aim to advance our…

Soft-actuated insect-scale micro aerial vehicles (IMAVs) pose unique challenges for designing robust and computationally efficient controllers. At the millimeter scale, fast robot dynamics ($\sim$ms), together with system delay, model…

Humanoid robots have demonstrated strong capabilities for interacting with static scenes across locomotion and manipulation, yet dynamic real-world interactions remain challenging. As a step toward fast-moving object interactions, we…