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Many kinds of adult Lepidoptera insects possess a long proboscis which is used to suck liquids and has the coiling and uncoiling movements. Although experiments revealed qualitatively that the coiling movement is governed by the hydraulic…
High speed video observations of free flying male Aedes aegypti mosquitoes, the dengue and yellow fever vector, along with custom measurement methods, enable measurement of wingbeat frequency, body position and body orientation of…
Saving energy and enhancing performance are secular preoccupations shared by both nature and human beings. In animal locomotion, flapping flyers or swimmers rely on the flexibility of their wings or body to passively increase their…
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…
Interspecific communication plays a critical role in mediating human-animal interactions, particularly in contexts involving access to anthropogenic resources. This study investigates the influence of human gazing on the begging strategies…
Reliable communication in Micro Air Vehicle (MAV) swarms is challenging in environments, where conventional radio-based methods suffer from spectrum congestion, jamming, and high power consumption. Inspired by the waggle dance of honeybees,…
Compared with fixed-wing flight, flapping flight can generate a higher lift and is also more maneuverable, largely resulting from the benefits of wing rotation. By analyzing the real wing kinematics of fruit flies, we found that the wing…
The guidance of human sperm cells under confinement in quasi 2D microchambers is investigated using a purely physical method to control their distribution. Transport property measurements and simulations are performed with dilute sperm…
Biological studies show that hummingbirds can perform extreme aerobatic maneuvers during fast escape. Given a sudden looming visual stimulus at hover, a hummingbird initiates a fast backward translation coupled with a 180-degree yaw turn,…
Unlike a helicopter, an insect can, in theory, use both lift and drag to stay aloft. Here we show that a dragonfly uses mostly drag to hover by employing asymmetric up and down strokes. Computations of a family of strokes further show that…
The ability to capture detailed interactions among individuals in a social group is foundational to our study of animal behavior and neuroscience. Recent advances in deep learning and computer vision are driving rapid progress in methods…
Biological organisms exhibit diverse strategies for adapting to varying environments. For example, a population of organisms may express the same phenotype in all environments (`unvarying strategy'), or follow environmental cues and express…
Molecular communication via diffusion (MCvD) is a method of achieving nano- and micro-scale connectivity by utilizing the free diffusion mechanism of information molecules. The randomness in diffusive propagation is the main cause of…
Microorganisms, such as bacteria and microalgae, often live in habitats consisting of a liquid phase and a plethora of interfaces. The precise ways in which these motile microbes behave in their confined environment remain unclear. Using…
Biological flapping wing fliers operate efficiently and robustly in a wide range of flight conditions and are a great source of inspiration to engineers. The unsteady aerodynamics of flapping-wings are dominated by large-scale vortical…
Optical micro-manipulation and trapping of micro-particles delivers a mechanical system in direct interaction with a beam of light. In this interaction, the optical properties such as polarisation, beam profile and wavelength of the…
The robust detection of small targets against cluttered background is important for future artificial visual systems in searching and tracking applications. The insects' visual systems have demonstrated excellent ability to avoid predators,…
Many elastic structures exhibit rapid shape transitions between two possible equilibrium states: umbrellas become inverted in strong wind and hopper popper toys jump when turned inside-out. This snap-through is a general motif for the…
Consider a flock of birds that fly interacting between them. The interactions are modelled through a hierarchical system in which each bird, at each time step, adjusts its own velocity according to his past velocity and a weighted mean of…
Systems of randomly packed, macroscopic elements, from jammed spherical grains to tangled long filaments, represent a broad class of disordered meta-materials with a wide range of applications and manifestations in nature. A `bird nest'…