Publications related to Bird 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

The effects of kinematics, flexibility, and planform on the vortex formation and aerodynamic performance of flapping wing flight

Alexander Gehrke

In this thesis, the aerodynamic challenges in flapping wing flight are addressed. In particular, the effects of different wing kinematics, flexibilities, and planforms on the the leading edge vortex development and aerodynamic performance are investigated. ...

EPFL2023

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

Fluid-structure interactions of bristled wings: the trade-off between weight and drag

Pedro Miguel Nunes Pereira de Almeida Reis, Matteo Pezzulla, Yuexia Luna Lin

The smallest flying insects often have bristled wings resembling feathers or combs. We combined experiments and three-dimensional numerical simulations to investigate the trade-off between wing weight and drag generation. In experiments of bristled strips, ...

Royal Soc2023

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

To tread or not to tread: comparison between water treading and conventional flapping wing kinematics

Karen Ann J Mulleners, Alexander Gehrke, Swathi Badala Krishna

Hovering insects are limited by their physiology and need to rotate their wings at the end of each back-and-forth motion to keep the wing's leading edge ahead of its trailing edge. The wing rotation at the end of each half-stroke pushes the leading edge vo ...

IOP Publishing Ltd2022

Observing the Central Arctic Atmosphere and Surface with University of Colorado uncrewed aircraft systems

Julia Schmale, Radiance Flore Aurore Calmer

Over a five-month time window between March and July 2020, scientists deployed two small uncrewed aircraft systems (sUAS) to the central Arctic Ocean as part of legs three and four of the MOSAiC expedition. These sUAS were flown to measure the thermodynami ...

NATURE PORTFOLIO2022

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

Phenomenology and scaling of optimal flapping wing kinematics

Karen Ann J Mulleners, Alexander Gehrke

Biological flapping wing fliers operate efficiently and robustly in a wide range of flight conditions and are a great source of inspiration to engineers. The unsteady aerodynamics of flapping wing flight are dominated by large-scale vortical structures tha ...

IOP PUBLISHING LTD2021

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

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

Performance enhancement of downwind sails due to leading edge flapping: A wind tunnel investigation

Julien Dominique Claude Deparday

This work presents a wind tunnel experimental study on the effect of the leading edge flapping on the aerodynamic performance of a spinnaker. Four J80-class spinnaker models, combining two different assembling structures (panel layout) and two different sa ...

PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD2018

Locomotion Dynamics for Bio-inspired Robots with Soft Appendages: Application to Flapping Flight and Passive Swimming

Yannick Morel, Mathieu Porez

In animal locomotion, either in fish or flying insects, the use of flexible terminal organs or appendages greatly improves the performance of locomotion (thrust and lift). In this article, we propose a general unified framework for modeling and simulating ...

Springer2017

Unsteady fluid dynamics around a hovering flat plate wing

Swathi Badala Krishna

Insect flight is characterised by complex time-dependent flows in response to the unsteady wing movements. Biological fliers exploit the unsteady flow fields to modulate aerodynamic forces, thereby displaying unmatched flight performance, especially in hov ...

EPFL2017

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

Large-Eddy Simulation of Very-Large-Scale Motions in the Neutrally Stratified Atmospheric Boundary Layer

Fernando Porté Agel, Jiannong Fang

Large-eddy simulation is used to investigate very-large-scale motions (VLSMs) in the neutrally stratified atmospheric boundary layer at a very high friction Reynolds number, . The vertical height of the computational domain is m, which corresponds to the t ...

Springer Verlag2015

Bio-inspired vision-based flying robots

Jean-Christophe Zufferey

There are not yet autonomous flying robots capable of manoeuvring in small cluttered environments as insects do. Encouraged by this observation, this thesis presents the development of ultra-light flying robots and control systems going one step toward ful ...

EPFL2005