Related papers: A Nonlinear Observability Analysis of Ambient Wind…

The mechanism by which a tiny insect or insect-sized robot could estimate its absolute velocity and distance to nearby objects remains unknown. However, this ability is critical for behaviors that require estimating wind direction during…

The neural encoding by biological sensors of flying insects, which prefilters stimulus data before sending it to the central nervous system in the form of voltage spikes, enables sensing capabilities that are computationally low-cost while…

Many aquatic organisms are able to track ambient flow disturbances and locate their source. These tasks are particularly challenging because they require the organism to sense local flow information and respond accordingly. Details of how…

The movements of birds, bats, and other flying species are governed by complex sensorimotor systems that allow the animals to react to stationary environmental features as well as to wind disturbances, other animals in nearby airspace, and…

Based on machine learning techniques, we propose a novel method to estimate flow fields using only floating sensor locations. This method does not require either ground-truth velocity fields or governing equations for fluid flows, which is…

This thesis presents a solution that enables aerial robots to reason about surrounding wind flow fields in real time using on board sensors and embedded flight hardware. The core novelty of this research is the fusion of range measurements…

Large-scale environmental sensing with a finite number of mobile sensors is a challenging task that requires a lot of resources and time. This is especially true when features in the environment are spatiotemporally changing with unknown or…

Accurate measurements of atmospheric flows at meter-scale resolution are essential for a broad range of sustainability applications, including optimal design of wind and solar farms, safe and efficient urban air mobility, monitoring of…

Many applications in aerodynamics, particularly in closed-loop control, depend on sensors to estimate the evolving state of the flow. This estimation task is inherently accompanied by uncertainty due to the noisy measurements of sensors or…

Fluid dynamics, and flight in particular, is a domain where organisms challenge our understanding of its physics. Integrating the current knowledge of animal flight, we propose to revisit the use of live animals to study physical phenomena.…

Insects use visual cues to control their flight behaviours. By estimating the angular velocity of the visual stimuli and regulating it to a constant value, honeybees can perform a terrain following task which keeps the certain height above…

Understanding airflow around a drone is critical for performing advanced maneuvers while maintaining flight stability. Recent research has worked to understand this flow by employing 2D and 3D flow sensors to measure flow from a single…

Olfactory search in turbulent environments is a sensorimotor challenge solved with remarkable efficiency by many animals, yet replicating this ability in artificial systems remains difficult because detections are intermittent and wind…

Tracking a turbulent plume to locate its source is a complex control problem because it requires multi-sensory integration and must be robust to intermittent odors, changing wind direction, and variable plume statistics. This task is…

There is evidence that flying animals such as pigeons, goshawks, and bats use optical flow sensing to enable high-speed flight through forest clutter. This paper discusses the elements of a theory of controlled flight through obstacle…

This paper presents a novel machine-learning framework for reconstructing low-order gust-encounter flow field and lift coefficients from sparse, noisy surface pressure measurements. Our study thoroughly investigates the time-varying…

The study of naturally occurring turbulent flows requires ability to collect empirical data down to the fine scales. While hotwire anemometry offers such ability, the open field studies are uncommon due to the cumbersome calibration…

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…

We consider a single non-holonomic Dubins-like robot traveling with a constant longitudinal speed in an a priori unknown and unsteady planar environment. The robot should detect, locate, and track the boundary of a dynamic environmental…

Tracking motions of humans or objects in the surroundings of the robot is essential to improve safe robot motions and reactions. In this work, we present an approach for scene flow estimation from low-density and noisy point clouds acquired…