Related papers: Advancing flight physics through natural adaptatio…
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…
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…
Big data and machine learning are driving comprehensive economic and social transformations and are rapidly re-shaping the toolbox and the methodologies of applied scientists. Machine learning tools are designed to learn functions from data…
Bird migration is an adaptive behavior ultimately aiming at optimizing survival and reproductive success. We propose an optimal switching model to study bird migration, where birds' migration behaviors can be efficiently modeled as…
Insects and birds are often faced by opposing requirements for agile and stable flight. Here, we explore the interplay between aerodynamic effort, maneuverability, and stability in a model system that consists of a $\Lambda$-shaped flyer…
The foraging behavior of animals is a paradigm of target search in nature. Understanding which foraging strategies are optimal and how animals learn them are central challenges in modeling animal foraging. While the question of optimality…
Fish schooling is often modeled with self-propelled particles subject to phenomenological behavioral rules. Although fish are known to sense and exploit flow features, these models usually neglect hydrodynamics. Here, we propose a novel…
Plants live in constantly moving fluid, whether air or water. In response to the loads associated with fluid motion, plants bend and twist, often with great amplitude. These large deformations are not found in traditional engineering…
Collective behaviors exhibited by animal groups, such as fish schools, bird flocks, or insect swarms are fascinating examples of self-organization in biology. Concepts and methods from statistical physics have been used to argue…
With the growing number of wind farms over the last decades and the availability of large datasets, research in wind-farm flow modeling - one of the key components in optimizing the design and operation of wind farms - is shifting towards…
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…
Network analysis has driven key developments in research on animal behaviour by providing quantitative methods to study the social structures of animal groups and populations. A recent formalism, known as \emph{multilayer network analysis},…
Experimental investigations using wind and water tunnels have long been a staple of fluid mechanics research for a large number of applications. These experiments often single out a specific physical process to be investigated, while…
In flapping flight, motion of the wings through the air generates the majority of the force and torque that controls the body motion. On the other hand, it is not clear how much effect the body motion imposes on the wings. We investigated…
Aerial operation in turbulent environments is a challenging problem due to the chaotic behavior of the flow. This problem is made even more complex when a team of aerial robots is trying to achieve coordinated motion in turbulent wind…
The move to high performance applications greatly increases the demand to produce large instantaneous fluid forces for high-speed maneuvering and improved power efficiency for sustained propulsion. Animals achieve remarkable feats of…
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.…
A robotic swarm that is required to operate for long periods in a potentially unknown environment can use both evolution and individual learning methods in order to adapt. However, the role played by the environment in influencing the…
Crawling is a common locomotion mechanism in soft robots and nonskeletal animals. In this work we propose modeling soft-robotic legged locomotion by approximating it with an equivalent articulated robot with elastic joints. For concreteness…
In this work, we have performed numerical simulations of the flapping motion of a rectangular wing in a three-dimensional flow field using the discrete vortex method (DVM). The DVM method is computationally more convenient because it does…