Related papers: Energy-positive soaring using transient turbulent …

The operation of drones in cluttered environments and over extended areas demands adaptive flight capabilities to meet the opposing aerodynamic requirements of agile and fast cruise flight. High agility and maneuverability are required to…

Predictive motion planning is the key to achieve energy-efficient driving, which is one of the main benefits of automated driving. Researchers have been studying the planning of velocity trajectories, a simpler form of motion planning, for…

We focus on the problem of developing energy efficient controllers for quadrupedal robots. Animals can actively switch gaits at different speeds to lower their energy consumption. In this paper, we devise a hierarchical learning framework,…

Groups of aircraft have the potential to save significant amounts of energy by flying in formations; all but the leading aircraft can benefit from the upwash of the wakes of preceding aircraft. A potential obstacle as the number of aircraft…

It is often overlooked by roboticists when designing locomotion controllers for their legged machines, that energy consumption plays an important role in selecting the best gaits for locomotion at high speeds or over long distances. The…

In this paper, we present a model describing the collective motion of birds. The model introduces spontaneous changes in direction which are initialized by few agents, here referred as leaders, whose influence act on their nearest…

The energy cascade and diverse turbulence properties of active-grid-generated turbulence were studied in a wind tunnel via hot-wire anemometry. To this aim, two active grid protocols were considered. The first protocol is the standard…

Soaring migrants exploit columns of rising air (thermals) to cover large distances with minimal energy. Employing social information while locating thermals may be beneficial, but examining collective movements in wild migrants has been a…

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…

Although battery technology has advanced tremendously over the past decade, it continues to be a bottleneck for the mass adoption of electric aircraft in long-haul cargo and passenger delivery. The onboard energy is expected to be utilized…

Existing research has yet to reach a consensus on whether and how small flying animals utilize elastic energy storage mechanisms to reduce flight energy expenditure, and there is a lack of systematic and universal methods for assessment. To…

Cross-country soaring flights rely on intermittent atmospheric updrafts to cover long distances, producing trajectories that alternate between rapid relocation and local exploration. From a large dataset of paraglider, hang glider, and…

Animal movements have been related to optimal foraging strategies where self-similar trajectories are central. Most of the experimental studies done so far have focused mainly on fitting statistical models to data in order to test for…

In natural foraging, many organisms seem to perform two different types of motile search: directed search (taxis) and random search. The former is observed when the environment provides cues to guide motion towards a target. The latter…

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…

Using a simple model for the trail formation of ants, the relation between i)the schedule of feeding which represents the unsteady natural environment, ii)emerging patterns of trails connecting a nest with food resources, and iii)the…

In this paper we are concerned with the learnability of energies from data obtained by observing time evolutions of their critical points starting at random initial equilibria. As a byproduct of our theoretical framework we introduce the…

Collective patterns of motion emerge across biological taxa: insects swarm, fish school, and birds flock. In particular, large migratory birds form strikingly ordered V-shaped formations, which experiments and direct numerical simulations…

Adaptive sampling and planning in robotic environmental monitoring are challenging when the target environmental process varies over space and time. The underlying environmental dynamics require the planning module to integrate future…

Parabolic Trough solar fields are among the most prominent methods for harnessing solar energy. However, continuous sun-tracking movements leads to wear and degradation of the tracking system, raising the question of whether the rotations…