Related papers: Controlled Flight of an Insect-Scale Flapping-Wing…
The miniaturisation of sensors and processors, the advancements in connected edge intelligence, and the exponential interest in Artificial Intelligence are boosting the affirmation of autonomous nano-size drones in the Internet of Robotic…
In ecological research, accurately collecting spatiotemporal position data is a fundamental task for understanding the behavior and ecology of insects and other organisms. In recent years, advancements in computer vision techniques have…
Insects have long been recognized for their ability to navigate and return home using visual cues from their nest's environment. However, the precise mechanism underlying this remarkable homing skill remains a subject of ongoing…
High speed navigation through unknown environments is a challenging problem in robotics. It requires fast computation and tight integration of all the subsystems on the robot such that the latency in the perception-action loop is as small…
Robots with multi-modal locomotion are an active research field due to their versatility in diverse environments. In this context, additional actuation can provide humanoid robots with aerial capabilities. Flying humanoid robots face…
Insects control unsteady aerodynamic forces on flapping wings to navigate complex environments. While understanding these forces is vital for biology, physics, and engineering, existing evaluation methods face trade-offs: high-fidelity…
Accurate estimation of aerodynamic forces is essential for advancing the control, modeling, and design of flapping-wing aerial robots with dynamic morphing capabilities. In this paper, we investigate two distinct methodologies for force…
This paper introduces a high-performance artificial intelligence operating system tailored for low-altitude aviation, designed to address key challenges such as real-time task execution, computational efficiency, and seamless modular…
Flapping-wing micro aerial vehicles offer quieter and safer operation than rotary-wing drones, yet achieving precise autonomous control of bird-scale ornithopters remains challenging: lift, airspeed, and turning authority are tightly…
Biologically-inspired robots are a very interesting and difficult branch of robotics dues to its very rich dynamical and morphological complexities. Among them, flying animals, such as bats, have been among the most difficult to take…
Inexpensive, portable lab-on-a-chip devices would revolutionize fields like environmental monitoring and global health, but current microfluidic chips are tethered to extensive off-chip hardware. Insects, however, are self-contained and…
An aerial vehicle powered by flapping feathered wings was designed, developed and fabricated. Different from legacy flapping-wing aerial vehicles with membrane wings, the new design uses authentic bird feathers to fabricate wings. In field…
Optical flow captures the motion of pixels in an image sequence over time, providing information about movement, depth, and environmental structure. Flying insects utilize this information to navigate and avoid obstacles, allowing them to…
Multimodal UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) are rarely capable of more than two modalities, i.e., flying and walking or flying and perching. However, being able to fly, perch, and walk could further improve their usefulness by expanding…
Flapping insect flight is a complex and beautiful phenomenon that relies on fast, active control mechanisms to counter aerodynamic instability. To directly investigate how freely-flying D. melanogaster control their body pitch angle against…
Lightweight aerial swarms have potential applications in scenarios where larger drones fail to operate efficiently. The primary foundation for lightweight aerial swarms is efficient relative localization, which enables cooperation and…
Wheeled ground robots are limited from exploring extreme environments such as caves, lava tubes and skylights. Small robots that utilize unconventional mobility through hopping, flying and rolling can overcome many roughness limitations and…
This paper discusses the wing inertial effects on stability of pitch motion of hovering insects. The paper also presents a dynamic model appropriate for using averaging techniques and discusses the pitch stability results derived from the…
Avian-informed drones feature morphing wing and tail surfaces, enhancing agility and adaptability in flight. Despite their large potential, realising their full capabilities remains challenging due to the lack of generalized control…
Inspired by the behavior of birds, we present AirCrab, a hybrid aerial ground manipulator (HAGM) with a single active wheel and a 3-degree of freedom (3-DoF) manipulator. AirCrab leverages a single point of contact with the ground to reduce…