Related papers: Using Drag to Hover
The propulsion of a flapping wing or foil is emblematic of bird flight and fish swimming. Previous studies have identified hallmarks of the propulsive dynamics that have been attributed to unsteady effects such as the formation and shedding…
An ever increasing number of applications can employ aerial unmanned vehicles, or so-called drones, to perform different sensing and possibly also actuation tasks from the air. In some cases, the data that is captured at a given point has…
Here we present the design of an insect-scale microrobot that generates lift by spinning its wings. This is in contrast to most other microrobot designs at this size scale which rely on flapping wings to produce lift. The robot has a wing…
Drones are a versatile platform for both amateur and professional photographers, enabling them to capture photos that are impossible to shoot with ground-based cameras. However, when guided by inexperienced pilots, they have a high…
This expository review is devoted to fish swimming and bird/insect flight. (i) The simple waving motion of an elongated flexible ribbon plate of constant width, immersed in a fluid at rest, propagating a wave distally down the plate to swim…
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…
We introduce a simple framework for learning aggressive maneuvers in flight control of UAVs. Having inspired from biological environment, dynamic movement primitives are analyzed and extended using nonlinear contraction theory. Accordingly,…
We consider a system of two competing populations in two-dimensional heterogeneous environments. The populations are assumed to move horizontally and vertically with different probabilities, but are otherwise identical. We regard these…
Flapping wings enable flying animals and biomimetic robots to generate elevated aerodynamic forces. Measurements that demonstrate this capability are based on tethered experiments with robots and animals, and indirect force calculations…
Albatrosses can travel a thousand kilometers daily over the oceans. This feat is achieved through dynamic soaring, a non-flapping flight strategy where propulsive energy is extracted from horizontal wind shears. Dynamic soaring has been…
In this paper, three-dimensional numerical simulations of ballooning in spiders using multiple silk threads are performed using the discrete elastic rods method. The ballooning of spiders is hypothesised to be caused by the presence of the…
Evolution and learning have historically been interrelated topics, and their interplay is attracting increased interest lately. The emerging new factor in this trend is morphological evolution, the evolution of physical forms within…
Airborne insects generate a leading edge vortex when they flap their wings. This coherent vortex is a low pressure region that enhances the lift of flapping wings compared to fixed wings. Insect wings are thin membranes strengthened by a…
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…
We study the role of unsteady lift in the context of flapping wings in birds' flight. Both aerodynamicists and biologists attempt to address this subject, yet it seems that the contribution of the unsteady lift still holds many open…
The centimeter-scale cyborg insects have a potential advantage for application in narrow environments where humans cannot operate. To realize such tasks, researchers have developed a small printed-circuit-board (PCB) which an insect can…
A method for asteroid deflection that makes use of a spacecraft moving back and forth on a segment of an appropriate Keplerian orbit about the asteroid is described and evaluated. It is shown that, on average, the spacecraft describing such…
The study of the movement of flocks, whether biological or technological is motivated by the desire to understand the capability of coherent motion of a large number of agents that only receive very limited information. In a biological…
The liquid cone-jet mode can be produced upon stimulation by a co-flowing gas sheath. Most applications deal with the jet breakup, leading to either of two droplet generation regimes: jetting and dripping. The cone-jet flow pattern is…
Dynamic manipulation, such as robot tossing or throwing objects, has recently gained attention as a novel paradigm to speed up logistic operations. However, the focus has predominantly been on the object's landing location, irrespective of…