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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,…
Flow visualisations are essential to better understand the unsteady aerodynamics of flapping wing flight. The issues inherent to animal experiments, such as poor controllability and unnatural flapping when tethered, can be avoided by using…
Tried-and-true flapping wing robot simulation is essential in developing flapping wing mechanisms and algorithms. This paper presents a novel application-oriented flapping wing platform, highly compatible with various mechanical designs and…
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…
With the emergence of new flapping-wing micro aerial vehicle (FWMAV) designs, a need for extensive and advanced mission capabilities arises. FWMAVs try to adapt and emulate the flight features of birds and flying insects. While current…
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…
We discuss the problem of designing and implementing controllers for insect-scale flapping-wing micro air vehicles (FWMAVs), from a unifying perspective and employing two different experimental platforms; namely, a Harvard RoboBee-like…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Flying vertebrates exhibit sophisticated wingbeat kinematics. Their specialized forelimbs allow for the wing morphing motion to couple with the flapping motion during their level flight, Previous flyable bionic platforms have successfully…
The flapping-wing aerial vehicle (FWAV) is a new type of flying robot that mimics the flight mode of birds and insects. However, FWAVs have their special characteristics of less load capacity and short endurance time, so that most existing…
Insect wings can undergo significant deformation during flapping motion owing to inertial, elastic and aerodynamic forces. Changes in shape then alter aerodynamic forces, resulting in a fully coupled Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI)…
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 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…
Unmanned aerial-aquatic vehicles (UAAVs) can operate both in the air and underwater, giving them broad application prospects. Inspired by the dual-function wings of puffins, we propose a UAAV with amphibious wings to address the challenge…
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…
Small multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), mainly quadcopters, are nowadays ubiquitous in research on aerial autonomy, including serving as scaled-down models for much larger aircraft such as vertical-take-off-and-lift vehicles for…