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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…
Tail bending associated with maneuvering flight of insects is a known phenomenon although there are only a few studies which analyze and quantify the effects and benefits of body configuration changes. We hypothesized that these…
Predictive motion planning is the key to achieve energy-efficient driving, which is one of the main benefits of automated driving. Researchers have been studying the planning of velocity trajectories, a simpler form of motion planning, for…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) play a crucial role in meteorological research, particularly in environmental wind field measurements. However, several challenges exist in current wind measurement methods using UAVs that need to be…
Obstacle avoidance path planning for uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs), or drones, is rarely addressed in most flight path planning schemes, despite obstacles being a realistic condition. Obstacle avoidance can also be energy-intensive,…
We consider the nonlinear optimal control of bypass transition in a boundary layer flow subjected to a pair of free stream vortical perturbations using a receding horizon approach. The optimal control problem is solved using the Lagrange…
This article solves an optimal control problem arising in attitude control of a spacecraft under state and control constraints. We first derive the discrete-time attitude dynamics by employing discrete mechanics. The orientation transfer,…
Aerial robots are evolving from avoiding obstacles to exploiting the environmental contact interactions for navigation, exploration and manipulation. A key challenge in such aerial physical interactions lies in handling uncertain contact…
Autonomous landing on sloped terrain poses significant challenges for small, lightweight spacecraft, such as rotorcraft and landers. These vehicles have limited processing capability and payload capacity, which makes advanced deep learning…
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…
In trajectory planning and control design for unmanned air vehicles, highly simplified models are typically used to represent the vehicle dynamics and the operating environment. The goal of this work is to perform real-time, but realistic…
A propulsion concept in which a spacecraft interacts with high-velocity pellets and the interstellar medium is proposed. The pellets are slower than the spacecraft and are accelerated backwards as they are overtaken, imparting a forward…
Coordinated flight of multiple drones allows to achieve tasks faster such as search and rescue and infrastructure inspection. Thus, pushing the state-of-the-art of aerial swarms in navigation speed and robustness is of tremendous benefit.…
In the last decade, a great effort has been employed in the study of Hybrid Unmanned Aerial Underwater Vehicles, robots that can easily fly and dive into the water with different levels of mechanical adaptation. However, most of this…
Understanding the complex patterns in space-time exhibited by active systems has been the subject of much interest in recent times. Complementing this forward problem is the inverse problem of controlling active matter. Here we use optimal…
How migratory birds can find the right way in navigating over thousand miles is an intriguing question, which much interested researchers in both fields of biology and physics for centuries. There several putative proposals that sound…
Agile quadrotor flight relies on rapidly planning and accurately tracking time-optimal trajectories, a technology critical to their application in the wild. However, the computational burden of computing time-optimal trajectories based on…
When deploying robots in shallow ocean waters, wave disturbances can be significant, highly dynamic and pose problems when operating near structures; this is a key limitation of current control strategies, restricting the range of…
Aerial drones offer a distinct potential to reduce the delivery time and energy consumption for the delivery of time-sensitive and small products. However, there is still a need in the relevant industry to understand the performance of…
Emulating natural mechanisms in technology has become a very efficient technique to optimize and improve the current machinery. Riblets are such kinds of bio-inspired surface patterns which are seen on Sharks. Their geometric properties…