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Insects and hummingbirds exhibit extraordinary flight capabilities and can simultaneously master seemingly conflicting goals: stable hovering and aggressive maneuvering, unmatched by small scale man-made vehicles. Flapping Wing Micro Air…
Numerical models indicate that collective animal behaviour may emerge from simple local rules of interaction among the individuals. However, very little is known about the nature of such interaction, so that models and theories mostly rely…
Swimming fish and flying insects use the flapping of fins and wings to generate thrust. In contrast, microscopic organisms typically deform their appendages in a wavelike fashion. Since a flapping motion with two degrees of freedom is able,…
Flying vertebrates exhibit sophisticated wingbeat kinematics. Their specialized forelimbs allow for the wing morphing motion to couple with the flapping motion during their level flight, Previous flyable bionic platforms have successfully…
In this work we investigate the spatio-temporal nature of various coherent modes present in a rotor wake using a combination of new PIV experiments and data from Biswas and Buxton (2024). A multi-scale triple decomposition of the acquired…
Dynamic soaring allows seabirds to harvest mechanical energy from vertical wind shear, but field trajectories lack a benchmark for comparing flight performances across species. We derive a reduced lower bound on transport effort from a…
The study of robotic flocking has received significant attention in the past twenty years. In this article, we present a constraint-driven control algorithm that minimizes the energy consumption of individual agents and yields an emergent V…
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…
In this work, Global Position System (GPS) data from a flock of homing pigeons are analysed. The flocking behaviour of the considered homing pigeons is formulated as a swarm optimal trajectory tracking control problem. The swarm problem in…
We perform direct numerical simulations (DNS) of actively controlled laminar separated wakes around low-aspect-ratio wings with two primary goals: (i) reducing the size of the separation bubble and (ii) attenuating the wing tip vortex.…
UAV collective motion has become a hot research topic in recent years. The realization of UAV collective motion, however, relied heavily on centralized control method and suffered from instability. Inspired by bird flocking theory, a…
We analyze interactions between turbulent airfoil wake and an extremely strong gust using a data-driven framework with time-dependent bases. The current approach represents each snapshot with time-varying bases consisting of two-dimensional…
Multirotors flying in close proximity induce aerodynamic wake effects on each other through propeller downwash. Conventional methods have fallen short of providing adequate 3D force-based models that can be incorporated into robust control…
Insect flight motors are extraordinary natural structures that operate efficiently at high frequencies. Structural resonance is thought to play a role in ensuring efficient motor operation, but the details of this role are elusive. While…
Animals that travel together in groups display a variety of fascinating motion patterns thought to be the result of delicate local interactions among group members. Although the most informative way of investigating and interpreting…
The specific objective of this paper is to develop a tool that calculates the optimal trajectory of the follower aircraft as it completes a formation rejoin, and then maintains the formation position, defined as a ring of points, until a…
Bird-sized flapping-wing robots offer significant potential for agile flight in complex environments, but achieving agile and robust trajectory tracking remains a challenge due to the complex aerodynamics and highly nonlinear dynamics…
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…
Bristled and membranous insect wings have co-evolved despite apparently serving the same functionality. We emulate flight physics using an automated free-fall experiment to better understand how and why several distinct wing forms may have…
We employ a novel computational modeling framework to perform high-fidelity direct numerical simulations of aero-structural interactions in bat-inspired membrane wings. The wing of a bat consists of an elastic membrane supported by a highly…