Related papers: Advancing flight physics through natural adaptatio…
The aerial environment in the operating domain of small-scale natural and artificial flapping wing fliers is highly complex, unsteady and generally turbulent. Considering flapping flight in an unsteady wind environment with a periodically…
Automating the navigation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in diverse scenarios has gained much attention in recent years. However, teaching UAVs to fly in challenging environments remains an unsolved problem, mainly due to the lack of…
Most birds can navigate seamlessly between aerial and terrestrial environments. Whereas the forelimbs evolved into wings primarily for flight, the hindlimbs serve diverse functions such as walking, hopping, and leaping, and jumping take-off…
Bio-inspired vehicles are currently leading the way in the quest to produce a vehicle capable of flight and underwater navigation. However, a fully functional vehicle has not yet been realized. We present the first fully functional vehicle…
Bristled and membranous insect wings have co-evolved despite apparently serving the same functionality. We emulate flight physics using an automated free-fall experiment to better understand how and why several distinct wing forms may have…
Ocean sampling for highly temporal phenomena, such as harmful algal blooms, necessitates a vehicle capable of fast aerial travel interspersed with an aquatic means of acquiring in-situ measurements. Vehicle platforms with this capability…
A model of an organism as an autonomous intelligent system has been proposed. This model was used to analyze learning of an organism in various environmental conditions. Processes of learning were divided into two types: strong and weak…
Thermodynamics could be seen as an expression of physics at a high epistemic level. As such, its potential as an inductive bias to help machine learning procedures attain accurate and credible predictions has been recently realized in many…
Image-based jet analysis is built upon the jet image representation of jets that enables a direct connection between high energy physics and the fields of computer vision and deep learning. Through this connection, a wide array of new jet…
We report on experimental and numerical studies aimed at developing an improved paradigm to model animal flight at moderate Reynolds numbers ($ 20 k - 50k $). A series of experiments were performed to characterize the behaviors of…
A theory is presented for wave-driven propulsion of floating bodies driven into oscillation at the fluid interface. By coupling the equations of motion of the body to a quasi-potential flow model of the fluid, we derive expressions for the…
Recently, reinforcement learning has become a promising and polular solution for robot legged locomotion. Compared to model-based control, reinforcement learning based controllers can achieve better robustness against uncertainties of…
Stretching and retracting wingspan has been widely observed in the flight of birds and bats, and its effects on the aerodynamic performance particularly lift generation are intriguing. The rectangular flat-plate flapping wing with a…
Designing soft robots poses considerable challenges: automated design approaches may be particularly appealing in this field, as they promise to optimize complex multi-material machines with very little or no human intervention.…
Biodiversity loss poses a significant threat to humanity, making wildlife monitoring essential for assessing ecosystem health. Avian species are ideal subjects for this due to their popularity and the ease of identifying them through their…
Gliding saves much energy, and to make large distances using only this form of flight represents a great challenge for both birds and people. The solution is to make use of the so-called thermals, which are localized, warmer regions in the…
This work addresses object identification under known dynamics in unmanned aerial vehicle applications, where learning and classification are combined through a physics-informed residual neural network. The proposed framework leverages…
Pursuit-evasion games are ubiquitous in nature and in an artificial world. In nature, pursuer(s) and evader(s) are intelligent agents that can learn from experience, and dynamics (i.e., Newtonian or Lagrangian) is vital for the pursuer and…
Flapping-wing insects, birds, and robots are thought to offset the high power cost of oscillatory wing motion by using elastic elements for energy storage and return. Insects possess highly resilient elastic regions in their flight anatomy…
We investigate the effect of wing twist flexibility on lift and efficiency of a flapping-wing micro air vehicle capable of liftoff. Wings used previously were chosen to be fully rigid due to modeling and fabrication constraints. However,…