Related papers: Leveraging three-dimensionality for navigation in …
Efficient point-to-point navigation in the presence of a background flow field is important for robotic applications such as ocean surveying. In such applications, robots may only have knowledge of their immediate surroundings or be faced…
Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) encounter significant energy, control and navigation challenges in complex underwater environments, particularly during close-proximity operations, such as launch and recovery (LAR), where fluid…
Quadrotors hold significant promise for several applications such as agriculture, search and rescue, and infrastructure inspection. Achieving autonomous operation requires systems to navigate safely through complex and unfamiliar…
Search and rescue environments exhibit challenging 3D geometry (e.g., confined spaces, rubble, and breakdown), which necessitates agile and maneuverable aerial robotic systems. Because these systems are size, weight, and power (SWaP)…
Oceanic turbulence influences the transport and mixing of freshwater, heat, nutrients, and other biogeochemical tracers. It also has broader implications for oceanic and atmospheric circulations. Tides contribute substantially to the…
Navigation underwater traditionally is done by keeping a safe distance from obstacles, resulting in "fly-overs" of the area of interest. Movement of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) through a cluttered space, such as a shipwreck or a…
Microswimmers can acquire information on the surrounding fluid by sensing mechanical queues. They can then navigate in response to these signals. We analyse this navigation by combining deep reinforcement learning with direct numerical…
This paper presents a three-dimensional, hydrodynamics-inspired collision avoidance framework for uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) formations operating in dynamic environments. When moving obstacles enter a UAV's sensing region, they are…
Today, low-altitude fixed-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are largely limited to primitively follow user-defined waypoints. To allow fully-autonomous remote missions in complex environments, real-time environment-aware navigation is…
Convolutional neural networks (CNNs) have recently been applied to predict or model fluid dynamics. However, mechanisms of CNNs for learning fluid dynamics are still not well understood, while such understanding is highly necessary to…
Autonomous underwater gliders use buoyancy control to achieve forward propulsion via a sawtooth-like, rise-and-fall trajectory. Because gliders are slow-moving relative to ocean currents, glider control must consider the effect of oceanic…
Three-dimensional experiments are presented on a school of three pitching hydrofoils. Two side-by-side leader foils maintain the same relative positions while the location of a third follower foil is varied. Force and flow measurements…
Cross-flow, or vertical-axis, turbines are a promising technology for capturing kinetic energy in wind or flowing water and their inherently unsteady fluid mechanics present unique opportunities for control optimization of individual rotors…
In marine plankton, many swimming species can perceive their environment with flow sensors. Can they use this flow information to travel faster in turbulence? To address this question, we consider plankters swimming at constant speed, whose…
Inspired by the wake-surfing nature of animals, this study aims to understand the aerodynamic force variation on a wing surfing in an unsteady 2-D wake. Wind tunnel experiments were conducted using Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) and force…
We study a predator-prey model of plankton dynamics in the two and three-dimensional wakes of turbulent flows behind a cylinder, focusing on the impact of the three-dimensional character of the carrying velocity field on population variance…
Wakes of upswept afterbodies are often characterized by a counter-rotating streamwise vortex pair. The unsteady dynamics of these vortices are examined with a spatio-temporally resolved Large-Eddy Simulation dataset on a representative…
Periodically forced, oscillatory fluid flows have been the focus of intense research for decades due to their richness as a nonlinear dynamical system and their relevance to applications in transportation, aeronautics, and energy…
The impact of fluidic actuation on the wake and drag of a three-dimensional blunt body is investigated experimentally. Jets blowing tangentially to the main flow allow to force the wake with variable frequency and amplitude. Depending on…
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have become very popular for many military and civilian applications including in agriculture, construction, mining, environmental monitoring, etc. A desirable feature for UAVs is the ability to navigate and…