Since the Wright Flyer, engineers have strived to develop flying machines with morphing wings that can control flight as deftly as birds. Birds morph their wing planform parameters simultaneously-including sweep, span, and area-in a way that has prov...
Within the framework of a biomimetic top-down approach, our study started with the technical question of the development of a hinge-free and compliant actuator inspired by plant movements. One meaningful biological concept generator was the opening a...
Randomness is common in biological and artificial systems, resulting either from stochasticity of the environment or noise in organisms or devices themselves. In locomotor control, randomness is typically considered a nuisance. For example, during dy...
At rest, beetles fold and tuck their hindwings under the elytra. For flight, the hindwings are deployed through a series of unfolding configurations that are passively driven by flapping forces. The folds lock into place as the wing fully unfolds and...
Stimuli-responsive actuating materials offer a promising way to power insect-scale robots, but a vast majority of these material systems are too soft for load bearing in different applications. While strategies for active stiffness control have been ...
In this paper, we perform experimental investigations of the aerodynamic characteristics due to wing clapping in bio-inspired flying robots; i.e., micro-air-vehicles (MAVs) that fly by flapping their wings. For this purpose, four flapping MAV models ...
The flight of bats is comparatively less documented and understood than birds and insects and may provide novel inspiration for the design of flapping flight robots. This study captured the natural flight of short-nosed fruit bats (Cynopterus sphinx)...