Related papers: Advancing flight physics through natural adaptatio…
A simplified model of the bird skeleton along with elongation parameters for the flight feathers is used to explore the diversity of bird shapes. Varying a small number of parameters simulates a wide range of observed bird silhouettes. The…
Bats' dynamic morphing wings are known to be extremely high-dimensional, and they employ the combination of inertial dynamics and aerodynamics manipulations to showcase extremely agile maneuvers. Bats heavily rely on their highly flexible…
1. Animal movement patterns contribute to our understanding of variation in breeding success and survival of individuals, and the implications for population dynamics. 2. Over time, sensor technology for measuring movement patterns has…
Exploring planetary bodies with lower gravity, such as the moon and Mars, allows legged robots to utilize jumping as an efficient form of locomotion thus giving them a valuable advantage over traditional rovers for exploration. Motivated by…
Before we attempt to learn a function between two (sets of) observables of a physical process, we must first decide what the inputs and what the outputs of the desired function are going to be. Here we demonstrate two distinct, data-driven…
Over the past decade the study of fluidic droplets bouncing and skipping (or ``walking'') on a vibrating fluid bath has gone from an interesting experiment to a vibrant research field. The field exhibits challenging fluids problems,…
The purpose of navigation is to determine the position, velocity, and orientation of manned and autonomous platforms, humans, and animals. Obtaining accurate navigation commonly requires fusion between several sensors, such as inertial…
The optical flow of humans is well known to be useful for the analysis of human action. Recent optical flow methods focus on training deep networks to approach the problem. However, the training data used by them does not cover the domain…
This research endeavors to design the perching maneuver and control in ornithopter robots. By analyzing the dynamic interplay between the robot's flight dynamics, feedback loops, and the environmental constraints, we aim to advance our…
Birds have a remarkable ability to perform complex maneuvers at post-stall angles of attack. The passive deployment of self-actuating covert feathers in response to unsteady flow separation while performing such maneuvers provides a passive…
Flight trajectory data plays a vital role in the traffic management community, especially for downstream tasks such as trajectory prediction, flight recognition, and anomaly detection. Existing works often utilize handcrafted features and…
The ability to use inexpensive, noninvasive sensors to accurately classify flying insects would have significant implications for entomological research, and allow for the development of many useful applications in vector control for both…
The passive flight of a thin wing or plate is an archetypal problem in flow-structure interactions at intermediate Reynolds numbers. This seemingly simple aerodynamic system displays an impressive variety of steady and unsteady motions that…
The physics of astrophysical jets can be divided into three regimes: (i) engine and launch (ii) propagation and collimation, (iii) dissipation and particle acceleration. Since astrophysical jets comprise a huge range of scales and…
Life depends as much on the flow of information as on the flow of energy. Here we review the many efforts to make this intuition precise. Starting with the building blocks of information theory, we explore examples where it has been…
Physics-based simulations are often used to model and understand complex physical systems and processes in domains like fluid dynamics. Such simulations, although used frequently, have many limitations which could arise either due to the…
Smart active particles can acquire some limited knowledge of the fluid environment from simple mechanical cues and exert a control on their preferred steering direction. Their goal is to learn the best way to navigate by exploiting the…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are commonly used for missions in unknown environments, where an exact mathematical model of the environment may not be available. This paper provides a framework for using reinforcement learning to allow the…
Automated tracking of animal movement allows analyses that would not otherwise be possible by providing great quantities of data. The additional capability of tracking in realtime - with minimal latency - opens up the experimental…
Natural fliers like bats exploit the complex fluid-structure interaction between their flexible membrane wings and the air with great ease. Yet, replicating and scaling the balance between the structural and fluid-dynamical parameters of…