Related papers: Bio-Inspired Synergistic Wing and Tail Morphing Ex…
Dynamic morphing wing flights present significant challenges in accurately estimating external forces due to complex interactions between aerodynamics, rapid wing movements, and external disturbances. Traditional force estimation methods…
This work presents an actuation framework for a bioinspired flapping drone called Aerobat. This drone, capable of producing dynamically versatile wing conformations, possesses 14 body joints and is tail-less. Therefore, in our robot, unlike…
Soaring birds gain energy from stable ascending currents or shear. However, it remains unclear whether energy loss due to drag can be overcome by extracting work from transient turbulent fluctuations. We designed numerical simulations of…
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…
Advanced technological breakthroughs and exceptional levels of innovation are enhancing the capabilities and potential of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs or drones), and in so doing attracting the interest of a broader swath of…
As natural predators, owls fly with astonishing stealth due to the sophisticated serrated surface morphology of their feathers that produces advantageous flow characteristics and favorable boundary layer structures. Traditionally, these…
Dynamic soaring allows seabirds to harvest mechanical energy from vertical wind shear, but field trajectories lack a benchmark for comparing flight performances across species. We derive a reduced lower bound on transport effort from a…
Perching with winged Unmanned Aerial Vehicles has often been solved by means of complex control or intricate appendages. Here, we present a simple yet novel method that relies on passive wing morphing for crash-landing on trees and other…
Modern high-performance combat aircraft exceed conventional flight-envelope limits on maneuverability through the use of thrust vectoring, and so achieve supermaneuverability. With ongoing development of biomimetic unmanned aerial vehicles…
Robot designs can take many inspirations from nature, where there are many examples of highly resilient and fault-tolerant locomotion strategies to navigate complex terrains by using multi-functional appendages. For example, Chukar and…
This paper presents a method for simultaneous optimization of the outer shape and internal topology of aircraft wings, with the objective of minimizing drag subject to lift and compliance constraints for multiple load cases. The physics are…
Autonomous drone navigation faces a critical challenge in achieving accurate landings on dynamic platforms, especially under unpredictable conditions such as wind turbulence. Our research introduces TornadoDrone, a novel Deep Reinforcement…
Sailing robots provide a low-cost solution to conduct the ocean missions such as marine exploration, pollution detection, and border surveillance, etc. However, compared with other propeller-driven surface vessels, sailboat suffers in…
Deformable substrates such as sand and mud present significant challenges for terrestrial robots due to complex robot-terrain interactions. Inspired by mudskippers, amphibious animals that naturally adjust their tail morphology and movement…
Most birds can navigate seamlessly between aerial and terrestrial environments. Whereas the forelimbs evolved into wings primarily for flight, the hindlimbs serve diverse functions such as walking, hopping, and leaping, and jumping take-off…
Bristled and membranous insect wings have co-evolved despite apparently serving the same functionality. We emulate flight physics using an automated free-fall experiment to better understand how and why several distinct wing forms may have…
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…
Swarms of drones offer an increased sensing aperture, and having them mimic behaviors of natural swarms enhances sampling by adapting the aperture to local conditions. We demonstrate that such an approach makes detecting and tracking…
Natural fliers like bats exploit the complex fluid-structure interaction between their flexible membrane wings and the air with great ease. Yet, replicating and scaling the balance between the structural and fluid-dynamical parameters of…
Rapidly generating an optimal chasing motion of a drone to follow a dynamic target among obstacles is challenging due to numerical issues rising from multiple conflicting objectives and non-convex constraints. This study proposes to resolve…