Concept
Bird flight
Related publications (36)
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 ...
EPFL2024The effects of kinematics, flexibility, and planform on the vortex formation and aerodynamic performance of flapping wing flight
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.I ...
EPFL2023Wing and tail morphing in birds and drones
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 ...
EPFL2023Fluid-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, ...
London2023Earwig-inspired foldable origami wing for micro air vehicle gliding
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 ...
Lausanne2023To 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 Ltd2022Observing 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 PORTFOLIO2022How ornithopters can perch autonomously on a branch
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 ...
Berlin2022Phenomenology 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 LTD2021Effects of wing kinematics, corrugation, and clap-and-fling on aerodynamic efficiency of a hovering insect-inspired flapping-wing micro air vehicle
A flapping-wing micro air vehicle (FW-MAV) operating with aerodynamically optimal wing configuration and kinematics may save energy and thus prolong flight time. In this work, we use a computational-fluid dynamic method to investigate the effects of wing k ...
ELSEVIER FRANCE-EDITIONS SCIENTIFIQUES MEDICALES ELSEVIER2021