Related papers: Flapping Wings Amplify Pitch Stability: Insights f…
Bristle-bots are legged robots that can be easily made out of a toothbrush head and a small vibrating engine. Despite their simple appearance, the mechanism enabling them to propel themselves by exploiting friction with the substrate is far…
This paper presents a data-driven method to identify an asymptotically stable Koopman system from noisy data. In particular, the proposed approach combines approximations of the system's forward- and backward-in-time dynamics to reduce bias…
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,…
The mechanical complexity of flapping wings, their unsteady aerodynamic flow, and challenge of making measurements at the scale of a sub-gram flapping-wing flying insect robot (FIR) make its behavior hard to predict. Knowing the precise…
Improving wind turbine efficiency is essential for reducing the costs of energy production. The highly nonlinear dynamics of the wind turbines and their uncertain operating conditions have posed many challenges for their control methods. In…
Synchronisation and stability under periodic oscillatory driving are well-understood, but little is known about the effects of aperiodic driving, despite its abundance in nature. Here, we consider oscillators subject to driving with slowly…
Aerial insects exhibit highly agile maneuvers such as sharp braking, saccades, and body flips under disturbance. In contrast, insect-scale aerial robots are limited to tracking non-aggressive trajectories with small body acceleration. This…
Biological locomotion, observed in the flexible wings of birds and insects, bodies and fins of aquatic mammals and fishes, consists of their ability to morph the wings/fins. The morphing capability holds significance in the abilities of…
Motter et al. derived a real-valued master stability function which determines whether and to what degree a given power grid is asymptotically stable. Stright and Edrington adopted certain uniformity assumptions on a grid's components and…
With the emergence of new flapping-wing micro aerial vehicle (FWMAV) designs, a need for extensive and advanced mission capabilities arises. FWMAVs try to adapt and emulate the flight features of birds and flying insects. While current…
Granular jamming is a popular soft robotics technology that has seen recent widespread applications including industrial gripping, surgical robotics and haptics. However, to date the field has not fully exploited the fundamental science of…
We consider the propulsive performance of an unsteady heaving and pitching foil, experimentally studying an extensive parameter space of motion amplitudes, frequencies, and phase offsets between the heave and pitch motions. The phase offset…
This paper proposes a new variable stiffness soft gripper that enables high-performance grasping tasks in industrial applications. The design of the proposed monolithic soft gripper includes a middle bellow and two side bellows (i.e.,…
Linear stability analysis of an elastically anchored wing in a uniform flow is investigated both analytically and numerically. The analytical formulation explicitly takes into account the effect of the wake on the wing by means of…
Incremental stiffness characterizes the variation of a material's force response to a small deformation change. Typically materials have an incremental stiffness that is fixed and positive, but recent technologies, such as super-lenses, low…
Motivated by the need to better understand flow unsteadiness in hydraulic turbines, we perform a local linear stability and adjoint-based sensitivity analysis of the turbulent swirling jet at the outlet of a Francis turbine. We use measured…
Abdominal Undulation with Compliant Mechanism Improves Flight Performance of Biomimetic Robotic ButterflThis paper presents the design, modeling, and experimental validation of a biomimetic robotic butterfly (BRB) that integrates a…
The spanwise organization of the flow over a thick airfoil is investigated using surface pressure measurements for a range of angles of attack around maximum lift and high Reynolds numbers (1 Million). Locally strong pressure fluctuations,…
This contribution is a follow-up of a recent paper by the authors on adaptive, non-linear time-frequency transforms, focusing on the STFT based transforms. The adaptivity is provided by a focus function, that depends on the analyzed…
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…