Publications related to Gliding flight

Accurate and agile flight with winged drones

Drones hold promise to assist in civilian tasks. To realize this application, future drones must operate within large cities, covering large distances while navigating within cluttered urban landscapes. The increased efficiency of winged drones over rotary ...

EPFL2024

Data from: Optimal blade pitch control for enhanced vertical-axis wind turbine performance

Karen Ann J Mulleners, Sébastien Le Fouest

This directory contains open-source data obtained using a single-bladed H-type vertical-axis wind turbine prototype with individual blade pitching. This data results from the optimisation of the blade's pitching kinematics using a genetic algorithm at two ...

Zenodo2024

Wing and tail morphing in birds and drones

Enrico Ajanic

To aid humans in civilian tasks, future drones will have to operate in large cities that abound with difficult flight conditions such as confined spaces, obstacles, and turbulent air. Such drones must cruise efficiently to cover vast distances fast and als ...

EPFL2023

Earwig-inspired foldable origami wing for micro air vehicle gliding

Jamie Paik, Risa Ishiguro

Foldable wings serve as an effective solution for reducing the size of micro air vehicles (MAVs) during non-flight phases, without compromising the gliding capacity provided by the wing area. Among insects, earwigs exhibit the highest folding ratio in thei ...

Frontiers Media Sa2023

How ornithopters can perch autonomously on a branch

Raphael Zufferey

Flapping wings produce lift and thrust in bio-inspired aerial robots, leading to quiet, safe and efficient flight. However, to extend their application scope, these robots must perch and land, a feat widely demonstrated by birds. Despite recent progress, f ...

Nature Portfolio2022

A Lightweight Device for Energy Harvesting from Power Lines with a Fixed-Wing UAV

Dario Floreano, William John Stewart

Modern UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) suffer from restrictions in flight range and time due to battery capacity limitations. One way to overcome these limitations is to harvest energy from overhead power lines. A growing body of scientific literature has ...

IEEE2022

Comparative dynamic flight stability of insect-inspired flapping-wing micro air vehicles in hover: Longitudinal and lateral motions

Hoang Vu Phan, Khanh Nguyen

In this paper, we compare the characteristics of hovering stability for two insect-inspired flapping-wing micro air vehicles (FW-MAVs) with different strategies to generate control moments for the longitudinal and lateral attitude controls. The two robots ...

2021

Bioinspired wing and tail morphing extends drone flight capabilities

Dario Floreano, Stefano Mintchev, Enrico Ajanic, Flavio Noca, Mir Alikhan Bin Mohammad Feroskhan

The aerodynamic designs of winged drones are optimized for specific flight regimes. Large lifting surfaces provide maneuverability and agility but result in larger power consumption, and thus lower range, when flying fast compared with small lifting surfac ...

2020

Dynamic stall on an airfoil undergoing VAWT blade angle of attack variations

Karen Ann J Mulleners, Sébastien Le Fouest, Sabrina Henne

Vertical axis wind turbines have several attractive features in the context of energy production in urban areas, but the inherent aerodynamic complexity of the flow around them has challenged their development on a larger scale. They generally operate at l ...

2020

Critical evolution of leading edge suction during dynamic stall

Karen Ann J Mulleners, Julien Dominique Claude Deparday

Dynamic stall dominates the aerodynamic performance, the robustness, and the wake dynamics of vertical axis wind turbines. To better assess the dynamic stall onset and its associated unsteady effects, this paper analyzes experimentally the evolution of the ...

IOP PUBLISHING LTD2018

A Versatile Method for Ice Particle Habit Classification Using Airborne Imaging Probe Data

Alexis Berne, Christophe Praz

A versatile method to automatically classify ice particle habit from various airborne optical array probes is presented. The classification is achieved using a multinomial logistic regression model. For each airborne probe, the model determines the particl ...

AMER GEOPHYSICAL UNION2018

Spatial Encoding of Translational Optic Flow in Planar Scenes by Elementary Motion Detector Arrays

Dario Floreano, Julien Jean Denis Nicolas Lecoeur, Emily Baird

Elementary Motion Detectors (EMD) are well-established models of visual motion estimation in insects. The response of EMDs are tuned to specific temporal and spatial frequencies of the input stimuli, which matches the behavioural response of insects to wid ...

Nature Research2018

Critical thickness of GaN on AlN: impact of growth temperature and dislocation density

Nicolas Grandjean, Denis Martin, Pirouz Sohi

Critical thickness and strain relaxation of c-plane GaN layers grown by molecular beam epitaxy on AlN were studied as a function of growth temperature and threading dislocation density (TDD). For this purpose we used AlN/sapphire templates and AlN single c ...

2017

Human-Comfortable Collision Free Navigation for Personal Aerial Vehicles

Dario Floreano, Felix Stephan Schill, Grégoire Hilaire Marie Heitz, Nicolas Dousse

Semi- or fully-autonomous Personal Aerial Vehicles (PAVs) are currently studied and developed by public and private organizations as a solution for traffic congestion. While optimal collision-free navigation algorithms have been proposed for autonomous rob ...

Ieee-Inst Electrical Electronics Engineers Inc2017

The effect of the phase angle between the forewing and hindwing on the aerodynamic performance of a dragonfly-type ornithopter

Jamie Paik, Alice Ghislaine Concordel

Dragonflies achieve agile maneuverability by flapping four wings independently. Different phase angles between the flapping forewing and hindwing have been observed during various flight modes. The aerodynamic performance depends on phase angle control, as ...

2016

A Large-eddy Simulation Study of Vertical Axis Wind Turbine Wakes in the Atmospheric Boundary Layer

Fernando Porté Agel, Sina Shamsoddin

In a future sustainable energy vision, in which diversified conversion of renewable energies is essential, vertical axis wind turbines (VAWTs) exhibit some potential as a reliable means of wind energy extraction alongside conventional horizontal axis wind ...

2016

A Large-Eddy Simulation Study of Vertical Axis Wind Turbine Wakes in the Atmospheric Boundary Layer

Fernando Porté Agel, Sina Shamsoddin

In a future sustainable energy vision, in which diversified conversion of renewable energies is essential, vertical axis wind turbines (VAWTs) exhibit some potential as a reliable means of wind energy extraction alongside conventional horizontal axis wind ...

2016

Aerial Locomotion in Cluttered Environments

Dario Floreano, Mirko Kovac, Jean-Christophe Zufferey, Adam Klaptocz, Jürg Markus Germann

Many environments where robots are expected to operate are cluttered with objects, walls, debris, and different horizontal and vertical structures. In this chapter, we present four design features that allow small robots to rapidly and safely move in 3 dim ...

Springer-Verlag Berlin2016

Dynamics of glide avalanches and snow gliding

Christophe Ancey

In recent years, due to warmer snow cover, there has been a significant increase in the number of cases of damage caused by gliding snowpacks and glide avalanches. On most occasions, these have been full-depth, wet-snow avalanches, and this led some people ...

Amer Geophysical Union2015

A wind-tunnel investigation of wind-turbine wakes in yawed conditions

Fernando Porté Agel, Majid Bastankhah

Wind-tunnel experiments were performed to study the performance of a model wind turbine and its wake characteristics in a boundary layer under different operating conditions, including different yaw angles and tip speed ratios. High-resolution particle ima ...

Journal of Physics2015