Related papers: Modeling, Simulation and Implementation of a Bird-…
An aerial vehicle powered by flapping feathered wings was designed, developed and fabricated. Different from legacy flapping-wing aerial vehicles with membrane wings, the new design uses authentic bird feathers to fabricate wings. In field…
Inverted landing is a challenging feat to perform in aerial robots, especially without external positioning. However, it is routinely performed by biological fliers such as bees, flies, and bats. Our previous observations of landing…
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…
This paper presents an adaptive autopilot for fixed-wing aircraft and compares its performance with a fixed-gain autopilot. The adaptive autopilot is constructed by augmenting the autopilot architecture with adaptive control laws that are…
Biological flapping wing fliers operate efficiently and robustly in a wide range of flight conditions and are a great source of inspiration to engineers. The unsteady aerodynamics of flapping-wings are dominated by large-scale vortical…
We designed and built a three degrees-of-freedom (DOF) flapping wing robot, Flapperoo, to study the aerodynamic benefits of wing folding and twisting. Forces and moments of this physical model are measured in wind tunnel tests over a…
Birds rely on active high-acceleration morphing and flapping to navigate complex airflows, but they can also maintain stable fixed-wing postures under persistent atmospheric disturbances. Here, we show that avian wings exhibit aerodynamic…
This study investigates the dynamics of passively morphing foils under accelerated plunging, establishing mechanistic links between transient kinematics, structural compliance, and aerodynamic performance. Two-way coupled simulations are…
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…
Accurate machine-learning models for aerodynamic prediction are essential for accelerating shape optimization, yet remain challenging to develop for complex three-dimensional configurations due to the high cost of generating training data.…
As roles for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) continue to diversify, the ability to sense and interact closely with the environment becomes increasingly important. Within this paper we report on the initial flight tests of a novel adaptive…
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…
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…
This paper presents a method for incorporating control analysis into design optimization for highly-maneuverable aircraft. By studying reachable sets for aircraft dynamics, we ensure that the optimizer will take the aircraft's controlled…
A control design approach to achieve fully autonomous take-off and flight maneuvers with a tethered aircraft is presented and demonstrated in real-world flight tests with a small-scale prototype. A ground station equipped with a controlled…
In this paper, the coordinated control problem of deformation and flight for morphing aircraft (MA) is studied by using meta-learning (ML) and coupled state-dependent Riccati equations (CSDREs). Our method is built on two principal…
How should zoomorphic, or bio-inspired, robots indicate to humans that interactions will be safe and fun? Here, a survey is used to measure how human willingness to interact with a simulated butterfly robot is affected by different flight…
The objective of this work is to design and develop a bio-inspired soft and articulated armwing structure which will be an integral component of a morphing aerial co-bot, Aerobat. In our design, we draw inspiration from bats. Bat membranous…
We consider flocks of artificial birds and study the emergence of V-like formations during flight. We introduce a small set of fully distributed positioning rules to guide the birds' movements and demonstrate, by means of simulations, that…
This paper addresses modeling and control of a six-degree-of-freedom unmanned aerial vehicle capable of vertical take-off and landing in the presence of wind disturbances. We design a hybrid vehicle that combines the benefits of both the…