Related papers: Insect-Scale Tailless Robot with Flapping Wings: A…
Aerodynamic ground effect in flapping-wing insect flight is of importance to comparative morphologies and of interest to the micro-air-vehicle (MAV) community. Recent studies, however, show apparently contradictory results of either some…
The effect of air viscosity on the flow around an insect wing increases as insect size decreases. For the smallest insects (wing length R below 1 mm), the viscous effect is so large that lift-generation mechanisms used by their larger…
Conventional Feedback-Linearization-based controller, applied to the tilt-rotor (eight inputs), results in the extensive changes in the tilting angles, which are not expected in practice. To solve this problem, we introduce the novel…
This paper presents a novel VTOL UAV that owns a link connecting four rotors and a fuselage by a passive joint, allowing the control of the rotor's tilting angle by adjusting the rotors' thrust. This unique structure contributes to…
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…
Flying vertebrates exhibit sophisticated wingbeat kinematics. Their specialized forelimbs allow for the wing morphing motion to couple with the flapping motion during their level flight, Previous flyable bionic platforms have successfully…
Inspired by flight characteristics captured from live Monarch butterflies, an optimal control problem is presented while accounting the effects of low-frequency flapping and abdomen undulation. A flapping-wing aerial vehicle is modeled as…
In previous research, various types of aerial robots were developed to improve maneuverability or manipulation abilities. However, there was a challenge in achieving both mobility and manipulation capabilities simultaneously. This is…
Tail bending associated with maneuvering flight of insects is a known phenomenon although there are only a few studies which analyze and quantify the effects and benefits of body configuration changes. We hypothesized that these…
Wing flexibility governs the flying performance of flapping wing flyers. Here, we use a self-propelled flapping-wing model mounted on a ``merry go round'' to investigate the effect of wing compliance on the propulsive efficiency of the…
For legged robots, aerial motions are the only option to overpass obstacles that cannot be circumvent with standard locomotion gaits. In these cases, the robot must perform a leap to either jump onto the obstacle or fly over it. However,…
The tailsitter vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL) UAV is widely used due to its lower dead weight, which eliminates the actuators and mechanisms for tilting. However, the tailsitter UAV is susceptible to wind disturbances in multi-rotor…
Soft-actuated insect-scale micro aerial vehicles (IMAVs) pose unique challenges for designing robust and computationally efficient controllers. At the millimeter scale, fast robot dynamics ($\sim$ms), together with system delay, model…
Flapping wing flight is a challenging dynamical problem and is also a very fascinating subject to study in the field of biomimetic robotics. A Bat, in particular, has a very articulated armwing mechanism with high degrees-of-freedom and…
The flapping-wing aerial vehicle (FWAV) is a new type of flying robot that mimics the flight mode of birds and insects. However, FWAVs have their special characteristics of less load capacity and short endurance time, so that most existing…
Overactuated Tilt Rotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles are renowned for exceptional wind resistance and a broad operational range, which poses complex control challenges due to non-affine dynamics. Traditional solutions employ multi-state…
Typical drones with multi rotors are generally less maneuverable due to unidirectional thrust, which may be unfavorable to agile flight in very narrow and confined spaces. This paper suggests a new bio-inspired drone that is empowered with…
This paper addresses the modeling and attitude control of jumping quadrupeds in low-gravity environments. First, a convex decomposition procedure is presented to generate high-accuracy and low-cost collision geometries for quadrupeds…
Autonomous flight of flapping-wing robots is a major challenge for robot perception. Most of the previous sense-and-avoid works have studied the problem of obstacle avoidance for flapping-wing robots considering only static obstacles. This…
Insects control unsteady aerodynamic forces on flapping wings to navigate complex environments. While understanding these forces is vital for biology, physics, and engineering, existing evaluation methods face trade-offs: high-fidelity…