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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…
Minimising the energy consumption associated with periodic motion is a priority common to a wide range of technologies and organisms - among them, many species of flying insect, for which flapping-wing flight is a life-essential mode of…
In this paper, we take an initial and novel step toward characterizing the physics of the hovering phenomenon in flapping insects and hummingbirds as a new class of extremum seeking (ES) feedback systems. By characterizing hovering flight…
Insects use flight muscles attached at the base of the wings to produce impressive wing flapping frequencies. The maximum power output of these flight muscles is insufficient to maintain such wing oscillations unless there is good elastic…
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…
Insects excel in trajectory and attitude handling during flight, yet the specific kinematic behaviours they use for maintaining stability in air disturbances are not fully understood. This study investigates the adaptive strategies of…
Production of energy (metabolism) and its distribution is vital for living organisms, both at individual level - between different functions of an organism, as well as between species of communities at different organizational levels,…
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,…
Hummingbirds and insects achieve outstanding flight performance by adapting their flapping motion to the flight requirements. Their wing kinematics can change from smooth flapping to highly dynamic waveforms, generating unsteady aerodynamic…
Birds, bats and many insects can tuck their wings against their bodies at rest and deploy them to power flight. Whereas birds and bats use well-developed pectoral and wing muscles and tendons, how insects control these movements remains…
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…
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…
We study experimentally a four-winged flapping flyer with chord-wise flexible wings in a self-propelled setup. For a given physical configuration of the flyer (i.e. fixed distance between the forewing and hindwing pairs and fixed wing…
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…
Wing flexibility governs the flying performance of flapping wing flyers. Here, we use a self-propelled flapping-wing model mounted on a ``merry go round'' to investigate the effect of wing compliance on the propulsive efficiency of the…
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…
Wing flapping is one of the most widespread propulsion methods found in nature; however, the current understanding of the aerodynamics in bird wakes is incomplete. The role of the unsteady motion in the flow and its contribution to the…
Collective patterns of motion emerge across biological taxa: insects swarm, fish school, and birds flock. In particular, large migratory birds form strikingly ordered V-shaped formations, which experiments and direct numerical simulations…
One of the motivations for exploring flapping-wing aerial robotic systems is to seek energy reduction, by maintaining manoeuvrability, compared to conventional unmanned aerial systems. A Flapping Wing Flying Robot (FWFR) can glide in…
Wing flexibility plays an essential role in the aerodynamic performance of insects due to the considerable deformation of their wings during flight under the impact of inertial and aerodynamic forces. These forces come from the complex wing…