Tiny "gnat robots," weighing just a few milligrams, were first conjectured in the 1980s. How to stabilize one if it were to hover like a small insect has not been answered. Challenges include the requirement that sensors be both low mass and high ban...
The albatross optimized flight maneuver-known as dynamic soaring-is nothing but a wonder of biology, physics, and engineering. By utilizing dynamic soaring, this fascinating bird can travel in the desired flight direction almost for free by harvestin...
Flight control such as stable hovering and trajectory tracking of tailless flapping-wing micro aerial vehicles is a challenging task. Given the constraint on actuation capability, flight control authority is limited beyond sufficient lift generation....
Flying rely on their vision to detect visual objects and adjust their flight course. Despite their robust fixation on a dark, vertical bar, our understanding of the underlying visuomotor neural circuits remains limited, in part due to difficulties i...
Recent observations of wingless animals, including jumping nematodes, springtails, insects, and wingless vertebrates like geckos, snakes, and salamanders, have shown that their adaptations and body morphing are essential for rapid self-righting and c...
Enhancing the aerodynamic performance of bristled wings is an important topic for small flying robotics. This paper numerically investigates this situation at very low Reynolds numbers by using elliptic cylinders as the bristles instead of circular c...
Bioinspired flapping-wing micro aerial vehicles (FWMAVs) have emerged over the last two decades as a promising new type of robot. Their high thrust-to-weight ratio, versatility, safety, and maneuverability, especially at small scales, could make them...
Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences
38652595
Studying the detailed biomechanics of flying animals requires accurate three-dimensional coordinates for key anatomical landmarks. Traditionally, this relies on manually digitizing animal videos, a labor-intensive task that scales poorly with increas...
Insects constitute the most species-rich radiation of metazoa, a success that is due to the evolution of active flight. Unlike pterosaurs, birds and bats, the wings of insects did not evolve from legs, but are novel structures that are attached to th...
Despite the profound implications of self-organization in animal groups for collective behaviors, understanding the fundamental principles and applying them to swarm robotics remains incomplete. Here we propose a heuristic measure of perception of mo...