Related papers: Analyzing and Mimicking the Optimized Flight Physi…
The albatross optimized flight maneuver -- known as dynamic soaring -- is nothing but a wonder of biology, physics, and engineering. By utilizing dynamic soaring, the bird can travel in the desired flight direction almost for free by…
In this letter, we reveal a universal, very simple extremum seeking natural feedback law and mechanism that governs, adapts, and generates in real-time, optimized lift variations for successful energy gain flight in presence of wind shear.…
Controlled gliding is one of the most energetically efficient modes of transportation for natural and human powered fliers. Here we demonstrate that gliding and landing strategies with different optimality criteria can be identified through…
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…
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…
Dynamical System (DS)-based closed-loop control is a simple and effective way to generate reactive motion policies that well generalize to the robotic workspace, while retaining stability guarantees. Lately the formalism has been expanded…
Dynamical Systems (DS) are an effective and powerful means of shaping high-level policies for robotics control. They provide robust and reactive control while ensuring the stability of the driving vector field. The increasing complexity of…
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…
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…
Dynamic soaring enables sustained flight by extracting energy from wind shear, yet it is commonly understood as a cycle-level maneuver that assumes stable flow conditions. In realistic unsteady environments, however, such assumptions are…
Motion mimicking is a foundational task in physics-based character animation. However, most existing motion mimicking methods are built upon reinforcement learning (RL) and suffer from heavy reward engineering, high variance, and slow…
In this letter, we report the first experimental demonstration of the recently emerged new paradigm in hovering and flapping flight physics called (Natural Hovering Extremum Seeking (NH-ES)) [doi.org/10.1103/4dm4-kc4g], which theorized that…
The ability to capture detailed interactions among individuals in a social group is foundational to our study of animal behavior and neuroscience. Recent advances in deep learning and computer vision are driving rapid progress in methods…
Thermal soaring enables birds to perform cost-efficient flights during foraging or migration trips. Yet, although all soaring birds exploit vertical winds effectively, this group contains species that vary strongly in their morphologies.…
Despite significant analysis of bird flight, generative physics models for flight dynamics do not currently exist. Yet the underlying mechanisms responsible for various flight manoeuvres are important for understanding how agile flight can…
Production of energy (metabolism) and its distribution is vital for living organisms, both at individual level - between different functions of an organism, as well as between species of communities at different organizational levels,…
We present a comprehensive study on discrete morphological symmetries of dynamical systems, which are commonly observed in biological and artificial locomoting systems, such as legged, swimming, and flying animals/robots/virtual characters.…
Autonomous unpowered flight is a challenge for control and guidance systems: all the energy the aircraft might use during flight has to be harvested directly from the atmosphere. We investigate the design of an algorithm that optimizes the…
This paper introduces the Minimal Biorobotic Stealth Distance (MBSD), a novel quantitative metric to evaluate the bionic resemblance of biorobotic aircraft. Current technological limitations prevent dragonfly-inspired aircrafts from…
In complex engineered systems, completing an objective is sometimes not enough. The system must be able to reach a set performance characteristic, such as an unmanned aerial vehicle flying from point A to point B, \textit{under 10 seconds}.…